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A step or degree in any series, rank, quality, order; relative position or standing; as, grades of military rank; crimes of every grade; grades of flour. They also appointed and removed, at their own pleasure, teachers of every grade. Buckle.

Moving by steps; walking; as, gradient automata. Wilkins.

Any member like a step, as the raised back of an altar or the like; a set raised over another. "The gradines of the amphitheeater." Layard.

A step or raised shelf, as above a sideboard or altar. Cf. Superaltar, and Gradin.

Proceeding by steps or degrees; advancing, step by step, as in ascent or descent or from one state to another; regularly progressive; slow; as, a gradual increase of knowledge; a gradual decline. Creatures animate with gradual life Of growth, sense, reason, all summed up in man. Milton.

To mark with degrees; to divide into regular steps, grades, or intervals, as the scale of a thermometer, a scheme of punishment or rewards, etc.

See Gree, a step. [Obs.]

A step.

See Gree a step. [Obs.]

A step. See Gree, a step. [Obs.] The top of the ladder, or first greeze, is this. Latimer.

See Gree, a step. [Obs.] B. Jonson.

A step (in a flight of stairs); a degree. [Obs.] Every grise of fortune Is smoothed by that below. Shak.

nd the first shift, in playing on the violin and kindred instruments. See Shift. -- Half step (Mus.), a semitone; the smallest difference of pitch or interval, used in music. -- Half tide, the time or state of the tide equally distant from ebb and flood. -- Half time, half the ordinary time for work or attendance; a…

(Music) A half step.

Heath. [Scot.] Gorse and grass And heather, where his footsteps pass, The brighter seem. Longfellow. Heather bell (Bot.), one of the pretty subglobose flowers of two European kinds of heather (Erica Tetralix, and E. cinerea).

To move interruptedly or with halts, jerks, or steps; -- said of something obstructed or impeded. Slides into verse, and hitches in a rhyme. Pope. To ease themselves . . . by hitching into another place. Fuller.

With a limping step.

guiltless; acceptable to God. Now through her round of holy thought The Church our annual steps has brought. Keble. Holy Alliance (Hist.), a league ostensibly for conserving religion, justice, and peace in Europe, but really for repressing popular tendencies toward constitutional government, entered into by Alexander I…

A dance; esp., an informal dance of ball. [Colloq.] Hop, skip (or step), and jump, a game or athletic sport in which the participants cover as much ground as possible by a hop, stride, and jump in succession. Addison.

ishment of injury. Humanizing by degrees, it admitted slavery instead of death; a further step was the exchange of prisoners instead of slavery. Franklin.