descent

noun

duh-SENT/dəˈsɛnt/UKdi-SENT/dɪˈsɛnt/

7 meanings of descent

1
nouncountable
The act of coming down from a higher position to a lower one.
The spacecraft's descent through the atmosphere generated intense heat.
She made a slow, careful descent into the valley below.
Similardrop, fall, plunge, dive
Oppositeascent, rise, climb
Note
The core sense, and the one the spelling explains. The word comes from Anglo-Norman descente, from descendre, so the noun ends in -t where the verb descend ends in -d, the same pattern as ascent and ascend. Writers on railways and cycling pair it with a gradient word: a sharp descent, an abrupt descent towards Keswick, or simply starting the descent.
2
noununcountable
A person's family origins or hereditary line; the ancestors from whom someone is descended.
He traces his descent from a long line of farmers.
Citizenship can sometimes be claimed through descent from a grandparent.
Similarancestry, lineage, parentage, extraction, origin
Note
Here the downward movement runs through generations rather than down a slope: what passes from parents to children comes down the line. Its most common frame is of plus a people or nationality, as in of Welsh descent. In that frame the noun takes no article, which sets it apart in use from the act of coming down.
3
nounusually singular
A fall to a lower status, rank, or condition; a decline.
The novel charts one family's descent from wealth into poverty.
Critics traced the city's descent into lawlessness over the decade.
Similardecline, fall, slide, deterioration, degeneration
Oppositerise, ascent, improvement, recovery
Note
The figurative slope keeps the vocabulary of the physical descent. A situation can go into a steep descent just as a road can. The preposition into names where the decline ends up, such as poverty, chaos or lawlessness, while the gradient adjective says how fast things got worse.
4
nouncountable
A route or path leading downward from a place.
Hikers warned us that the southern descent was blocked by rockfall.
The only descent into the canyon was a narrow, winding trail.
Oppositeascent, climb
5
nouncountable
A sloping passage or incline that runs downward.
The driveway ended in a sharp descent toward the garage.
Engineers graded the descent so that trucks could brake safely.
Similarslope, incline, decline, drop, dip
Oppositeascent, rise, climb
6
nouncountable
A sudden hostile attack or invasion of a place.
Coastal towns lived in dread of a sudden descent by pirates.
The general planned a descent on the enemy's supply lines.
Similarraid, attack, assault, invasion, incursion
Oppositeretreat, withdrawal
7
noununcountable
In mathematics, a method for assembling global structures from compatible local pieces, generalizing the idea of gluing.
Like stitching overlapping map sections into one seamless map, provided the overlaps agree.
The theorem uses descent to glue locally defined functions into a single global one.
Faithfully flat descent allows the construction of objects from local data.
Note
Topology borrows the word for a gluing question: when can data defined on the pieces of a covering be assembled into one global object? Descent extends the familiar gluing constructions, and the same framework reaches into algebraic geometry for sheaves and bundles. Because it names a whole method, it usually appears without an article: one uses descent, or faithfully flat descent.

Practice

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Origin

From Middle English and Anglo-Norman descente, from Anglo-Norman descendre ("to descend"); compare ascent and ascend. It is a doublet of desant.