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Imagine I have three brothers older than me e.g. Jack(30), Isac(28) and Noah(27). How can I refer to them? For instance may I refer to jack as my oldest/biggest brother? May I call Isac my second older brother. It seems a bit not-English to me! and to Noah as my third older brother or my youngest older bro.

How would you refer to your family member older than you? Do the rules appply for younger brothers as well?

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    Answers to this will probably be opinion based, but I would call any brother older than me "my older brother". The age relationship between them should be described based on the oldest brother. "Jack is the oldest...They are all older than me." I wouldn't use "my second older brother".
    – user3169
    Sep 10, 2014 at 16:11
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    It's my second oldest brother (or eldest). All three brothers are older (than you), so if you've just mentioned any two of them, the third one could be referred to as "the third older bother*. But that implies nothing about how old that one is relative to the other two "older brothers".
    – FumbleFingers
    Sep 10, 2014 at 16:16

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No, "second older brother" is not idiomatic in this context.

"Older" is a comparative:

Isac is older than I am.

Saying "older brother" is short for saying "brother who is older than I am." It does not give any information about whether the brother is the oldest in the family or not; it compares two ages without regard to any other considerations.

By contrast, "oldest" ("eldest" in some UK dialects) is a superlative.

Between Jack, Isaac, and Noah, Jack is the oldest.

In English, at least, the concept of being second in age is still treated as a modified superlative, not a comparative. So you would say:

Isaac is my second oldest brother.

The fact that it specifies an order, even if that order is not technically first, means the superlative construction is used instead of the comparative function.

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    Imagine one has 10 brothers! Can he call his brother who is in the middle of the order of the ages as my 5th oldest brother?
    – Juya
    Sep 10, 2014 at 22:32
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    @Juya, in English-speaking cultures it's rarely needed to specify or know the exact birth order of all your siblings. If an odd circumstance arises where we do need to specify the order, we would indeed resort to a long phrase like "5th oldest brother".
    – The Photon
    Sep 11, 2014 at 4:38
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    Yes; or, more likely, we'd phrase it differently, something like, "Joe is the fifth child in my family" or "Joe is the fifth oldest boy in the family." In most natively English-speaking countries, families large enough for this to be a problem are rare.
    – chapka
    Sep 11, 2014 at 13:26

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