Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Becoming gradually less; waning.

from The Century Dictionary.

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

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Her.) A crescent with the horns directed towards the sinister.
  • adjective Becoming less by gradual diminution; decreasing.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Becoming gradually less; diminishing.
  • adjective Waning.
  • noun heraldry A crescent oriented with horns turned to sinister (pointing right).

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin dēcrēscēns, dēcrēscent-, present participle of dēcrēscere, to decrease; see decrease.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From decressant, from Anglo-Norman, present participle of decrestre ("to decrease")

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Examples

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

    Alonzo and Melissa The Unfeeling Father Daniel Jackson

  • 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 1881

Comments

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  • Mono, moll.

    September 16, 2008

  • 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...

    September 16, 2008