second best

1. 1.

   the competitor who finishes second

   Synonymsrunner-up

   Broaderrival

Questions about second best

What does second best mean?

second best means "the competitor who finishes second".

What is another word for second best?

Close synonyms include runner-up. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is second best a common word?

second best is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.