Word.ws English Dictionary

pænultimate

pænultimate is the archaic spelling of penultimate.

Meaning of penultimate

Adjective

penultimate (not comparable)

  1. (UK, literary) Next to last, second to last; immediately preceding the end of a sequence, list, etc.
    • […] they [the sounds of an echo] next strike the ultimate secondary object, then the penultimate and antepenultimate; […]1677, Robert Plot, “Of the Heavens and Air”, in The natural history of Oxford-shire: Being an Essay Toward the Natural History of England, page 15
  2. Of or pertaining to a penult.
  3. (rare) Relating to or denoting an element of a related collection of curves that is arbitrarily close to a degenerate form.
  4. (proscribed) pre-eminent, ultimate, best; par excellence, top-quality
    • This Book is the Proud Purple Penultimate!!1907 Gelett Burgess Are You a Bromide? (New York: B. W. Heubsch) cover blurb

See all 9 meanings of penultimate

Questions about pænultimate

What is pænultimate the archaic spelling of?
Pænultimate is the archaic spelling of penultimate.

Words near pænultimate in the dictionary

  1. pædophilic
  2. pænal
  3. pæninsula
  4. pænitence
  5. pænitent
  6. pænultimate
  7. pænumbra
  8. Pæonia
  9. pæonies
  10. pæony
  11. père

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pænultimate (page history and authors); penultimate (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “pænultimate.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/p%C3%A6nultimate. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.