descent
pronunciation
How to pronounce descent in British English:
UK [dɪˈsent]
How to pronounce descent in American English:
US [dɪˈsent]
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- Noun:
- a movement downward
- properties attributable to your ancestry
- the act of changing your location in a downward direction
- the kinship relation between an individual and the individual's progenitors
- a downward slope or bend
- the descendants of one individual
Word Origin
- descent (n.)
- c. 1300, from Old French descente "descent, descendance, lineage," formed from descendre (see descend) on analogy of French nouns such as attente from attendre "to expect," vente "sale" from vendre "to sell," pente "slope" from pendre "to hang" (the etymological English word from Latin would be *descence). Figurative use is from late 14c. Meaning "action of descending," also "a downward slope" is from 1590s. Meaning "act of descending from an ancestor" is from mid-14c. Evolutionary sense is from 1859 in Darwin, though there are uses which suggest essentially the same thing going back to 1630s.
Antonym
Example
- 1. Some worry about a descent to italian standards .
- 2. But in the case of balloons , the descent sometimes comes sooner than expected .
- 3. After traveling roughly 80000 kilometers ( 50000 miles ) , the spacecraft deployed its initial chutes to stabilize and slow its descent .
- 4. Researchers have observed , for example , that long-haul pilots who sleep during flights perform better when maneuvering aircraft through the critical stages of descent and landing .
- 5. Each nonterminal in a parsing expression grammar essentially represents a parsing function in a recursive descent parser , and the corresponding parsing expression represents the " code " comprising the function .