Of a Royal Navy ship of the line in the Napoleonic Era: having 80–98 guns across three gun decks, a complement of 700–750, and weighing approximately 2,200 tons burthen.
Of mediocre quality; not first-rate.
noun
A second-rate ship of the line.
How often have the words first-class and second-rate occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )