degree
Pluraldegrees
- 1An award bestowed by a university or college to certify academic achievement; in the United States it can also include secondary-school credentials.
After four years of study, she received a degree in mechanical engineering.
Many employers now require a degree for entry-level positions.
UsageYou get or earn a degree in a subject; bachelor's and master's take 's: a bachelor's degree, two master's degrees.
Note
The older idea was a stage of proficiency within a course of study, and the university award is the meaning that now dominates.
- 2The amount to which an entity possesses a given property; relative intensity or extent.
Like a volume knob: it shows not whether something is present, but how much.
The two designs share a surprising degree of similarity.
His success depended to a large degree on careful planning.
UsageUsually in set phrases: to a large degree, to some degree, to what degree; often a high degree of something.
Similarextent, level, amount, measure, intensity
Note
The American novelist Winston Churchill's The Celebrity (1897) has a narrator whose failure to spot genius "may in some degree be pardoned".
- 3A unit for measuring temperature on scales such as Celsius or Fahrenheit.
The thermostat reads a single degree above freezing.
Overnight the temperature fell several degrees below zero.
UsageThe scale name follows degree or degrees: 30 degrees Celsius. Also degrees above or below zero.
Note
A temperature degree has no single fixed size. Its size depends on the scale named after the number, which is why 212 degrees Fahrenheit and 100 degrees Celsius describe the same temperature. On the Celsius scale one degree is very nearly a hundredth of the interval between water's freezing and boiling points at standard air pressure.
- 4A unit for measuring angles, equal to one 360th of a full circle, also used to give latitude and longitude.
The triangle's interior angles sum to one hundred eighty degrees.
A shift of even one degree alters the satellite's trajectory.
Note
Geometry divides the full turn into 360 of these, each split into sixty minutes of arc and each minute into sixty seconds.
- 5One of the numbered grades (first, second, third and so on) used to rank how serious a crime, burn or injury is.
He pleaded guilty to assault in the third degree and was sentenced to probation.
Paramedics treated two firefighters for second-degree burns at the scene.
UsageBefore a noun it is hyphenated: second-degree burns. In legal phrasing it often follows: assault in the third degree.
Similargrade
Note
The two scales run in opposite directions. In American law, first-degree murder is the gravest grade of the crime, while a first-degree burn is the shallowest kind, affecting only the outer layers of skin.
- 6One of the successive stages a process passes through, or one level on a scale of values.
Like moving through the gears of a machine, one stage after another.
She gained confidence by slow degrees as the weeks passed.
The change came so gradually, degree by degree, that hardly anyone noticed the neighborhood emptying out.
UsageMostly in by degrees, meaning gradually, and degree by degree.
- 7The place a note holds in a musical scale, numbered upward from the tonic, which is the scale's first and principal note.
The leading tone sits on the seventh degree and pulls strongly back toward the tonic.
Melodies in this folk tradition often skip the fourth and seventh degrees of the scale.
Note
In music theory the steps of a scale carry names as well as numbers. In a major scale the first is the tonic, followed by the supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant and submediant, and the seventh is the leading tone. Musicians say "the fifth degree" or "scale degree five" alike, and because counting always starts from the tonic, the numbers move with the key.
Less common meanings
- 8A level of rank or privilege; one's social standing within a hierarchical order.
Like rungs on a social ladder, each marking a place above or below the next.
Guests were seated according to their degree at the royal table.
In the medieval romance, a noblewoman gives up her lands to marry a knight of humble degree.
UsageMostly in of high degree or of low degree, as in old stories and songs.
Similarrank, status, standing, station, class
Note
Rank pictured as a rung belongs to the language of an ordered society. Tyndale's Newe Testamẽt of 1526 praises a teacher who does not consider "eny mãnes degre". The Life and Death of Iacke Straw (1593) sets the "difference in degrees" against the equality of Adam and Eve.
- 9A step in genealogical descent, used to measure how closely two relatives are connected.
A parent and child are separated by a single degree of descent.
The lawyers counted the degrees of kinship to settle the inheritance.
UsageOften numbered: a first-degree relative, related in the second degree.
Note
Kinship is counted in steps of descent, the way lawyers and genealogists reckon it. Under the civil method, first cousins stand in the fourth degree: count up to the shared grandparent, then down again. The same count can measure pedigree. Colin Jones's The Great Nation (2002) describes scholarships for noblemen able to prove four degrees of noble status.
Checked 5 Nov 2026 · 3 facts
- Kinship degrees count generations; under the civil method, first cousins are fourth-degree relatives, counting up to their shared grandparent and down again. www2.texasattorneygeneral.gov
- Colin Jones wrote The Great Nation, first published in 2002. openlibrary.org
- Degrees can measure noble descent, and Jones describes scholarships requiring proof of four degrees of noble status. en.wiktionary.org
- 10Any of the forms (positive, comparative, superlative) used in comparing an adjective or adverb.
The superlative degree expresses the highest level of a quality.
Many languages mark the comparative degree with a special suffix.
UsageNamed after the stage: the comparative degree, the superlative degree.
Note
Grammarians call the whole set the degrees of comparison. Big, bigger, biggest climbs from positive through comparative to superlative. Some grammatical descriptions add a further rung, the elative, so the list is not always closed at three.
- 11The sum of the exponents of a term, or the highest such sum among a polynomial's terms.
A polynomial of degree four can have up to four roots.
Multiplying two terms adds their degrees together.
UsageOften of degree plus a bare number: a polynomial of degree 2.
Note
A polynomial takes the degree of its highest-ranking term, so a quadratic has degree two and a cubic degree three. Order was once used for the same quantity, but it now has other meanings in mathematics, so degree is the clearer word.
- 12One's relative state or experience; one's way or manner of being.
If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
1851, Herman Melville, Moby-DickNote
An archaic use, met mostly in older books, where it means one's own lot or measure rather than any rank. In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), the narrator Ishmael claims almost all men "in their degree" share his feeling for the ocean, each in his own way. Today, keep to that fixed phrase. Elsewhere readers will hear social rank or extent instead.
Checked 5 Nov 2026 · 4 facts
- Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick. en.wikipedia.org
- Moby-Dick was first published in 1851. en.wikipedia.org
- The novel uses the exact phrase “in their degree” when describing almost all men's feelings towards the ocean. gutenberg.org
- The speaker is the narrator Ishmael, who describes his own feelings towards the ocean. gutenberg.org
- 13The number of edges that meet at a vertex in a graph; its valency.
- 14A measure of an arc's curvature, expressed as the angle subtended by a fixed length of arc or chord.
- 15The dimensionality of a field extension, taken as a vector space over the base field.
- 16The number of logical connectives that appear in a formula.
- 17A step on a staircase, or the rung of a ladder.
Practice
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Origin
Latin "gradus," with the prefix "de-" added, is the source of Old French "degré," which Middle English borrowed as "degre."