adjective
Next to the last.
When I was a school-boy, during the penultimate decade of the last century, the chief American grammar was “A Practical Grammar of the English Language,” by Thomas W. Harvey. This formidable work was almost purely synthetical: it began with a long series of definitions, wholly unintelligible to a child, and proceeded into a maddening maze of pedagogical distinctions, puzzling even to an adult.
—H. L. Mencken The American Language (1921)
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