1 (formal) to come or go down from a higher to a lower level:
[V] The plane began to descend. * The results, ranked in descending order (= from the highest to the lowest) are as follows: * [VN] She descended the stairs slowly.
OPPASCEND
2 [V] (formal) (of a hill, etc.) to slope downwards:
At this point the path descends steeply.
OPPASCEND
3 [V] ~ (on / upon sb/sth) (literary) (of night, darkness, a mood, etc.) to arrive and begin to affect sb/sth
SYNFALL:
Night descends quickly in the tropics. * Calm descended on the crowd.
PHRASALVERBS
be descended from sb to be related to sb who lived a long time ago:
He claims to be descended from a Spanish prince.
descend into sth [nopassive] (formal) to gradually get into a bad state:
The country was descending into chaos.
descend on / upon sb/sth to visit sb/sth in large numbers, sometimes unexpectedly:
Hundreds of football fans descended on the city.
descend to sth [nopassive] to do sth that makes people stop respecting you:
They descended to the level of personal insults.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for descend is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is descend a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, descend is tagged as verb.
Does descend appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — descend appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
