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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

dual.

Characterized by having two (usually equivalent) components.

4 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

adj/ˈd͡ʒuː.əl//ˈdjuː.əl//ˈdul/General-American/ˈd(j)u.əl/General-American
  1. Characterized by having two (usually equivalent) components.

    not-comparable
    a dual-motor vehicle
  2. Pertaining to two, pertaining to a pair of.

    not-comparable
    dual engine failure
    dual citizenship
  3. Pertaining to a grammatical number in certain languages that refers to two of something, such as a pair of shoes.

    not-comparable
    Modern Arabic displays a dual number, as did Homeric Greek.
  4. Exhibiting duality.

    not-comparable
  5. Being the space of all linear functionals of (some other space).

    not-comparable
  6. Being the dual of some other category; containing the same objects but with source and target reversed for all morphisms.

    not-comparable
Where this word comes from

PIE word *dwóh₁ Borrowed from Latin dualis (“two”), from duo (“two”) + adjective suffix -alis.

noun/ˈd͡ʒuː.əl//ˈdjuː.əl//ˈdul/General-American/ˈd(j)u.əl/General-American
  1. Of an item that is one of a pair, the other item in the pair.

  2. Of a regular polyhedron with V vertices and F faces, the regular polyhedron having F vertices and V faces.

    The octahedron is the dual of the cube. The icosahedron is the dual of the dodecahedron.
  3. The dual number.

  4. Of a vector in an inner product space, the linear functional corresponding to taking the inner product with that vector. The set of all duals is a vector space called the dual space.

  5. A head-to-head match or meet between two teams, such as two high schools or colleges.

Where this word comes from

PIE word *dwóh₁ Borrowed from Latin dualis (“two”), from duo (“two”) + adjective suffix -alis.

verb/ˈd͡ʒuː.əl//ˈdjuː.əl//ˈdul/General-American/ˈd(j)u.əl/General-American
  1. To convert from single to dual; specifically, to convert a single-carriageway road to a dual carriageway.

    transitive
Where this word comes from

PIE word *dwóh₁ Borrowed from Latin dualis (“two”), from duo (“two”) + adjective suffix -alis.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.