to second
- verb
- /sɪˈkɒnd/
- UK
- After a year in marketing, she was seconded to the HR team for training purposes.
Examples
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Teachers enter the civil service as employees of the central government, although they are immediately and almost always permanently seconded to the regional governments.
Academic text (1995) -
I was seconded to the sales department to help manage a new project.
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I was seconded for duty from the Home Office.
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I was a professional soldier seconded from the British Army.
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He is to be seconded to the Treasury Department.
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I've been seconded to the Arab Bureau.
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In 1938, Bill was appointed Assistant Keeper in the Department of Ethnography of the British Museum, although from 1942 to 1945 he was seconded to the Board of Trade.
Academic text (1994) -
To demonstrate government interest, the colonial administration seconded Mr. Donald Faulkner, an accomplished social worker from the Prisons Department, as the first colonial welfare officer.
Academic text (2011) -
Even before World War II, General Douglas MacArthur was seconded to the Philippine government, acting as commander-in-chief of both American and Filipino forces.
Academic text (1992) -
My first appointment as a professor was about 35 years ago, when the University of Kuopio in Finland seconded me to the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
Academic text (2016)
Synonyms
Move a person to a different job or place of work within a company
Idioms
- Informal
A person who has a less important role and helps someone more important
Phrasal Verbs
- Informal
To doubt your own decisions and worry you made the wrong choice
Compounds
A child of your parent's first cousin who shares your great-grandparents but not your grandparents
A player who stands near second base and catches or throws the ball to get runners out
A junior officer with the lowest rank in the Army, Air Force, or Marine Corps
- Specialized
Words that refer to the person or people you speak to, for example 'you'
A meeting of Catholic Church leaders from 1962 to 1965 that changed worship and encouraged talks with other Christian churches
A measure of speed that shows how many kilometers something moves in one second
- Specialized
Energy naturally spreads from hot places to cold ones, increasing disorder
A woman who cares for someone like a mother, often with or instead of their own mother
- Archaic
A period in old age when mental decline makes a person behave like a young child
- Specialized
An extra second added to clocks so they match how fast the Earth turns
- Specialized
A unit that shows how many small pieces of information called bits are sent every second
- Informal
A belief that food dropped on the floor for less than two seconds is still safe to eat
- Specialized
A measure of how many billion math calculations a computer does each second
- Specialized
A rule that you can extend any straight line without end in both directions
- Archaic
A unit equal to one thousand cycles per second, now called kilohertz
- Specialized
The distance light travels in one second in empty space, about 300,000 kilometers
- Archaic
A unit equal to one million cycles per second for measuring radio frequencies
- Specialized
A measure of how fast a computer does one million math calculations each second
- Specialized
A unit for measuring how fast a computer processor runs, equal to one million instructions per second
- Specialized
A rule that a force changes an object's motion more when the force is bigger or the object is lighter
A person who belongs to a Christian group that believes Christ will return soon
How Temporary
- UK
Surface Forms
Etymology
Second in the sense of sending someone temporarily comes from the idea of making them a 'second' or helper elsewhere, so to be seconded is to be sent to support another team or project for a time.