Did you know?
"Penultimate" has two noun relatives that are used commonly enough to have gained entry into abridged dictionaries: "penult" and "penultima." Although "penultimate" is used generally to refer to anything that's next to last, "penult" and "penultima" are often a bit more specific, in that they are usually the label for the next to last syllable of a word. "Penultimate" has also developed a second sense for something relating to the last syllable of a word ("a penultimate accent"). All three derive from "paenultimus," a Latin adjective that has the same meaning as "penultimate"; logically enough, "paenultimus" results from the combination of "paene" (meaning "almost") and "ultimus" (meaning "last").