Picture of Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
Re: Dictionary
by Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets - Tuesday, 11 January 2011, 11:32 AM
  As Dimitris showed you, "second" doesn't only refer to a length of time, but also to an ordinal number, which in Greek are translated differently. So once again, no, the Greek results are not interchangeable.

Dictionary search is tricky, and you need to have a good understanding of both the source and the target language to get it right. Even reversed search doesn't always help (although cases like "second" are relatively uncommon).

As for your comment "or can it be a gender thing?", I don't understand where you could get the idea that it could be a gender thing. Dictionaries normally don't list gender alternatives as separate words, except when they are completely different words like "uncle and "aunt", but you would expect those to appear only with words referring to people (like γιος: "son" and κόρη: "daughter"), in which case English most often has separate words too (actually more often than Greek). You wouldn't expect such gender differences to show up for a noun like "second" (as in length of time, why would such a noun have gendered alternatives?) and especially not for an adjective like "weird" (where gender alternatives are grammatical, and thus normally not listed in a dictionary. You need to know you are looking at an adjective, and guess its type and gender forms from its ending. A dictionary will only list the masculine form).

Just like dictionaries don't list the past tense of verbs as a separate word from the present tense, they don't list gender alternatives either.