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  1. decrescent love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. adj. Becoming gradually less; waning.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. Decreasing; becoming gradually less; waning, as the moon.
  2. Specifically— In heraldry, decreasing or waning: said of the moon when represented with the points toward the sinister side. Also decours.
  3. In botany, diminishing gradually from below upward.
  4. n. In heraldry, the moon in her decrement: used as a bearing. See decrement, 3.

Wiktionary

  1. adj. Becoming gradually less; diminishing.
  2. adj. Waning.
  3. n. heraldry A crescent oriented with horns turned to sinister (pointing right).

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. adj. Becoming less by gradual diminution; decreasing.
  2. n. (Her.) A crescent with the horns directed towards the sinister.

Etymologies

  1. From decressant, from Anglo-Norman, present participle of decrestre ("to decrease") (Wiktionary)
  2. Latin dēcrēscēns, dēcrēscent-, present participle of dēcrēscere, to decrease; see decrease. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

  • “Thin scuds flew swiftly over the moon's decrescent form.”

    Alonzo and Melissa The Unfeeling Father

  • “We were quite out of earshot from the road, and it would be hard to imagine a more desolate place than it appeared, between two and three o'clock on that March night, the bare twigs of the birch-trees wriggling in the bleak wind, the faint light of the decrescent moon, that seemed to be upside down in the sky, falling on the white rocks, and on the whitened branches torn down by the winter's storms, lying like bleached bones upon the ground before us.”

    Paul Patoff

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synonyms (1)

Words with the same meaning

  1. decreasing

antonyms (1)

Words with the opposite meaning

  1. increscent

reverse dictionary (2)

Words that contain this word in their definition

  1. decours
  1. crescent

tags (3)

Free-form, user-generated categorization

  1. eee
  1. heraldry
  1. cvccvccvcc

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Lists

These user-created lists contain the word ‘decrescent’.

Comments

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  • mollusque My rule when I started my monovocalics list was to use the form with the most occurrences of the vowel, so I listed decrescence. But since then, I've tagged by number of vowels, so I can see you'd expect decrescent to be listed too.

    Darn, an excuse to list more words... Sep 16, 2008

  • bilby Mono, moll. Sep 15, 2008

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‘decrescent’ has been looked up 1009 times, added to 10 lists, commented on 2 times, and has a Scrabble score of 15.