DUAL

Dual

Dual is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural. When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities identified by the noun or pronoun. Verbs can also have dual agreement forms in these languages.

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dual

Noun

  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.
  3. dual number The grammatical number of a noun marking two of something (as in singular, dual, plural), sometimes referring to two of anything (a couple of, exactly two of), or a chirality-marked pair (as in left and right, as with gloves or shoes) or in some languages as a discourse marker, "between you and me". A few languages display trial 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.

Adjective

  1. Exhibiting duality; characterized by having two (usually equivalent) components.
  2. Acting as a counterpart.
  3. Double.
    dual-headed computer
  4. Pertaining to grammatical number (as in singular and plural), referring to two of something, such as a pair of shoes, in the context of the singular, plural and in some languages, trial grammatical number. Modern Arabic displays a dual number, as did Homeric Greek.


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: dual
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