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The act or the state of declining; declination; descent; slope. The declension of the land from that place to the sea. T. Burnet.

Belonging to declension. Declensional and syntactical forms. M. Arnold.

djective, which indicate its relation to other words, and in the aggregate constitute its declension; the relation which a noun or pronoun sustains to some other word. Case is properly a falling off from the nominative or first state of word; the name for which, however, is now, by extension of its signification, appli…

Dissolution; degeneration; decay. [R.] Sad catalysis and declension of piety. Evelyn.

A falling away; decay; deterioration; declension. "The old castle, where the family lived in their decadence.' Sir W. Scott.

Capable of being declined; admitting of declension or inflection; as, declinable parts of speech.

The act of inflecting a word; declension. See Decline, v. t.,

Lacking some of the usual forms of declension or conjugation; as, a defective noun or verb. -- De*fect"ive*ly, adv. -- De*fect"ive*ness, n.

The act of going downward; descent; falling or sinking; declension; degradation. Oblique descension (Astron.), the degree or arc of the equator which descends, with a celestial object, below the horizon of an oblique sphere. -- Right descension, the degree or arc of the equator which descends below the horizon of a ri…

To make equal in weight; to counterbalance. "More than equiponderated the declension in that direction." De Quincey.

The variation of words by declension, comparison, or conjugation; inflection.

Syntactical change of form of words, as by declension or conjugation; inflection. Express the syntactical relations by flexion. Sir W. Hamilton.

- Ground form (Gram.), the stem or basis of a word, to which the other parts are added in declension or conjugation. It is sometimes, but not always, the same as the root. -- Ground furze (Bot.), a low slightly thorny, leguminous shrub (Ononis arvensis) of Europe and Central Asia,; -- called also rest- harrow. -- Gro…

A word which is irregular or anomalous either in declension or conjugation, or which deviates from ordinary forms of inflection in words of a like kind; especially, a noun which is irregular in declension.

An example of a conjugation or declension, showing a word in all its different forms of inflection.

Applied to forms in Anglo-Saxon, etc., which retain the old declensional endings. In the Teutonic languages the vowel stems have held the original endings most firmly, and are called strong; the stems in -n are called weak other constant stems conform, or are irregular. F. A. March. Strong conjugation (Gram.), the conj…

o, that part of a noun or verb which remains unchanged (except by euphonic variations) in declension or conjugation; stem.

The table; hence, the pleasures of the table; food. It could be no ordinary declension of nature that could bring some men, after an ingenuous education, to place their "summum bonum" upon their trenchers. South. Trencher cap, the cap worn by studens at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, having a stiff, flat, square ap…

Change of termination of words, as in declension, conjugation, derivation, etc.

Decline; failure; diminution; decrease; declension. An age in which the church is in its wane. South. Though the year be on the wane. Keble.