Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Second-rate \Sec"ond-rate`\, a.
Of the second size, rank, quality, or value; as, a
second-rate ship; second-rate cloth; a second-rate champion.
--Dryden.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1660s, originally of ships; see rate (n.).
Wiktionary
a. Of mediocre quality, not first class. n. (context military nautical historical English) a British ship-of-the-line sail warship that has 90 to 98 guns dispersed onto 3 gundecks.
WordNet
Wikipedia
In the British Royal Navy, a second rate was a ship of the line which by the start of the 18th century mounted 90 to 98 guns on three gun decks; earlier 17th-century second rates had fewer guns and were originally two-deckers or had only partially armed third gun decks.
The term in no way implied that they were of inferior quality. They were essentially smaller and hence cheaper versions of the three-decker first rates. Like the first rates, they fought in the line of battle, but unlike the first rates, which were considered too valuable to risk in distant stations, the second rates often served also in major overseas stations as flagships. They had a reputation for poor handling and slow sailing. They were popular as Flagships of admirals commanding the Windward and/or leeward islands station, which was usually a Rear Admiral of the Red.
Usage examples of "second-rate".
At present, in Great Britain at least, the headmasters entrusted with the education of the bulk of the influential men of the next decades are conspicuously second-rate men, forced and etiolated creatures, scholarship boys manured with annotated editions, and brought up under and protected from all current illumination by the kale-pot of the Thirty-nine Articles.
Having a cymol on the team would transform us from a second-rate and never-was broken down company into one that would be almost, if not absolutely, unique.
Norm Ballard, a second-rate Ed Gein who liked to waylay unwary travelers who happened by his out-of-the-way Nebraska farm.
But during all the years of his prenticeship, he had never heard one word of praise from this man, nothing but complaints about how lazy Alvin was, and how second-rate his work was, and all the time Makepeace Smith was lying, all the time he knew Alvin was good.
Royal Flush took the ID a step further: Goines was a second-rate utility trombone, usually hired for fill-in duty.
X-Men, listening to the audience chuckle over the inane dialog, exclaiming at the second-rate special effects, such was the nature of my thoughts, and it occurred to me that not only was the film an exemplar of cultural decline, but a parable that might be interpreted as an illumination of our essential dilemma.
I was able to hang on this long, even as a second-rate legman in a backwater Tri-Di area.
Self-taught scrabblers in the dust, most of them, seduced by second-rate reading into the delusion that they are educated.
His Slavophil and reactionary effusions are rather second-rate, but some of the elegies, written in a state of dejection during his sufferings, have genuine human feeling in them without losing any of his verbal splendor.
Most of my work was for second-rate clothing stores that had too much shoplifting, hard-working bookies whose wives had gone for Chiclets and never came back, and old ladies who had lost their cats, who were always named Sheiba.
I was only speaking in reference to the second-rate fortunes we were mentioning just now.
The dreams you get with a coprocessor are bloody, vivid, and obscure, like second-rate German Expressionism.
He'd given the addict some, but promised him more, of a glassine bag of heroin that Drew had spent part of the afternoon relieving from a second-rate pusher.
He was remarkably heavier than his popular image, too, although his apparent weight problem might be illusory, the fault of the second-rate haberdasher who had put him in a loosely fitted robe that did nothing to flatter his figure.
After years of muddy inefficiency, of contentedness with the second-rate and the dishonest, that flame astoundingly bursts forth, from a hidden, unheeded spark that none had ever thought to blow upon.