Secondary is an adjective meaning "second" or "second hand". It may refer to:
- The group of (usually at least four) defensive backs in American football and Canadian football
- An obsolete name for the Mesozoic in geosciences
- The secondary winding, or the electrical or electronic circuit connected to the secondary winding in a transformer
- Secondary color
- Secondary consumers in ecology Trophic dynamics
- Secondary dominant in music
- Secondary education
- Secondary school - The type of school at the secondary level of education
- Secondary market, an aftermarket where financial assets are traded
- Secondary market offering
- Secondary mirror, second mirror element/focusing surface in a reflecting telescope
- Secondary neoplasm
- Secondaries, the second-largest group of remiges (wing feathers), which attach to the inner lower arm
- Private equity secondary, investment in an existing private equity fund or other alternative asset
Famous quotes containing the word secondary:
“Scientific reason, with its strict conscience, its lack of prejudice, and its determination to question every result again the moment it might lead to the least intellectual advantage, does in an area of secondary interest what we ought to be doing with the basic questions of life.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman “other” or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.”
—Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)