primary vs second

primary

adj
  • main; principal; chief; placed ahead of others. 

  • Earliest formed; fundamental. 

  • first or earliest in a group or series. 

  • Relating to day-to-day care provided by health professionals such as nurses, general practitioners, dentists etc. 

  • Relating to the place where a disorder or disease started to occur. 

  • Illustrating, possessing, or characterized by, some quality or property in the first degree; having undergone the first stage of substitution or replacement. 

noun
  • A directly driven inductive coil, as in a transformer or induction motor that is magnetically coupled to a secondary 

  • A primary school. 

  • A primary election; a preliminary election to select a political candidate of a political party. 

  • A radar return from an aircraft (or other object) produced solely by the reflection of the radar beam from the aircraft's skin, without additional information from the aircraft's transponder. 

  • Any flight feather attached to the manus (hand) of a bird. 

  • A base or fundamental component; something that is irreducible. 

  • The most massive component of a gravitationally bound system, such as a planet in relation to its satellites. 

  • The first year of grade school. 

  • A primary colour. 

  • Primary site of disease; original location or source of the disease. 

  • The first stage of a thermonuclear weapon, which sets off a fission explosion to help trigger a fusion reaction in the weapon's secondary stage. 

verb
  • To challenge (an incumbent sitting politician) for their political party's nomination to run for re-election, through running a challenger campaign in a primary election, especially one that is more ideologically extreme. 

  • To take part in a primary election. 

second

adj
  • Next to the first in value, power, excellence, dignity, or rank; secondary; subordinate; inferior. 

  • Number-two; following after the first one with nothing between them. The ordinal number corresponding to the cardinal number two. 

  • Being of the same kind as one that has preceded; another. 

adv
  • After the first; at the second rank. 

  • After the first occurrence but before the third. 

noun
  • The agent of a party to an honour dispute whose role was to try to resolve the dispute or to make the necessary arrangements for a duel. 

  • An additional helping of food. 

  • Something that is number two in a series. 

  • A second-class honours degree. 

  • One-sixtieth of a minute; the SI unit of time, defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of caesium-133 in a ground state at a temperature of absolute zero and at rest. 

  • A unit of angle equal to one-sixtieth of a minute of arc or one part in 3600 of a degree. 

  • The interval between two adjacent notes in a diatonic scale (either or both of them may be raised or lowered from the basic scale via any type of accidental). 

  • A manufactured item that, though still usable, fails to meet quality control standards. 

  • Second base. 

  • A short, indeterminate amount of time. 

  • Something that is next in rank, quality, precedence, position, status, or authority. 

  • One who supports or seconds a motion, or the act itself, as required in certain meetings to pass judgement etc. 

  • A chance or attempt to achieve what should have been done the first time, usually indicating success this time around. (See second-guess.) 

  • The place that is next below or after first in a race or contest. 

  • A Cub Scout appointed to assist the sixer. 

  • The second gear of an engine. 

  • One who supports another in a contest or combat, such as a dueller's assistant. 

verb
  • To climb after a lead climber. 

  • To assist or support; to back. 

  • To agree as a second person to (a proposal), usually to reach a necessary quorum of two. (See under [[#Etymology 3]] for translations.) 

  • To agree as a second person to (a proposal), usually to reach a necessary quorum of two. (This may come from the English adjective above.) 

  • To accompany by singing as the second performer. 

  • To follow in the next place; to succeed. 

  • To transfer temporarily to alternative employment. 

How often have the words primary and second occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )