Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. One that descends.
- n. Printing The part of the lowercase letters, such as g, p, and q, that extends below the other lowercase letters.
- n. Printing A letter with such a part.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. One who descends.
- n. That which descends, as a descending letter (which see, under descending).
Wiktionary
- n. A person or thing that descends.
- n. typography The part of a lowercase letter that is drawn below the bottom of lowercase letters, such as the tail of the letters g, p, and q.
- n. cycling A cyclist who excels at fast descents.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. One who descends.
WordNet 3.0
- n. someone who descends
- n. (printing) the part of lowercase letters that extends below the other lowercase letters
- n. a lowercase letter that has a part extending below other lowercase letters
Etymologies
- descend + -er (“agent suffix”) (Wiktionary)
Examples
“The name descender is significant of the fact that there is along its whole course a descent to its banks; or it may simply denote the rapidity with which it "descends" to the Dead Sea.”
“It's when the dreadlocked, pierced-eared 19-year-old hooks a safety rope to a metal clip on his harness, wraps another rope through a metal device called a descender and steps from the roof of a building into nothingness.”
“Palestine -- the "descender," if not "the river of God" in the book of Psalms, at least that of his chosen people throughout their history.”
“Connected by a cable to a high-speed "descender" machine, riders wearing jumpsuits and harnesses will leap from the edge of the observation tower toward a landing platform 855 feet below.”
“Double-click on the 'descender' symbol in the library and add a new layer.”
“Return to Scene 1 and drag the 'descender' symbol onto the stage.”
“Es que al descender del avión y abandonar la manga de desembarco, la recepción que le dan a uno es sencillamente sorprendente.”
Global Voices in English » Paraguay: Governmental Response to Arrival of H1N1 Virus
“I throw my sleeping bag in, tap my descender clip and sink in slowly.”
“I unhook my ascender and switch over to a descender, not really ready to leave, to drop through the branches and return to the ground, and in this moment of readjustment, of powering my body down and trying to memorize the view, I recognize the feeling.”
“At the same time, they held off a valiant pursuit from deadly descender Samuel Sanchez, who closed to within 18 seconds before finally conceding 50 seconds, and they increased their advantage over the Leipheimer-Menchov quartet from 1: 14 at the mountaintop to 2: 05 at the line.”
Inisde the Tour de France with John Wilcockson: Tour of attrition gets even tougher
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘descender’.
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Typography
An attempt to assemble all common typographic jargon.
typography, alignment, ascender, descender, baseline, boldface, bullet, cap height, glyph, condensed, digraph, backslant and 11 more...
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wordplay terms
affix-clipping, alternade, alternating termi..., backswitch, balanced letter sum, beheadment, binade, capitonyms, catoptron, changeover, changing offset s..., charade and 96 more...
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Monovocalics
Words that have only one of the vowels. On this list I include only words with at least three vowels. When I first started the list, if a word had several forms, I generally listed only the one wit...
syzygy, mirific, cumulus, homolog, monocot, bedewed, jezebel, referee, bikini, minikin, locomotor, terebenthene and 2359 more...
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tomduck's geeky words
obfuscate, recursive, idempotent, intractable, integer, spline, tesselate, node, tree, axis, delta, interleave and 68 more...
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Graphic Design
serif, stem, rag, bleed, ligature, grotesque, river, orphan, widow, kearning, leading, em dash and 5 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for descender.
oroboros In wordplay, a lowercase letter that dips below the line: e.g., g, j, p, q, y.
--Chris Cole, Wordplay May 22, 2008