Word of the Day

: April 5, 2016

declension

noun dih-KLEN-shun

What It Means

1 : the inflectional forms of a noun, pronoun, or adjective

2 : a falling off or away : deterioration

3 : descent, slope

declension in Context

The most common declension in modern English is the set of plural nouns marked as plural with a simple "-s."

"You jump in and begin seeing and hearing simple words in the foreign language and start translating, learning nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech without memorizing declensions and without tears." — Reid Kanaley, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 2 May 2013

Did You Know?

Declension came into English (via Middle French) in the first half of the 15th century, originating in the Latin verb declinare, meaning "to inflect" or "to turn aside." The word seems to have whiled away its time in the narrow field of grammar until Shakespeare put a new sense of the word in his play Richard III in 1593: "A beauty-waning and distressed widow / … Seduc'd the pitch and height of his degree / To base declension and loath'd bigamy." This "deterioration" sense led within a few decades to the newest sense of the word still in common use, "descent" or "slope." The 19th century saw still another new sense of the word—meaning "a courteous refusal"—but that sense has remained quite rare.