decline

Meanings

Noun

• Downward movement, fall.
• A sloping downward, e.g. of a hill or road.
• A weakening.
• A reduction or diminution of activity.
• The act of declining or refusing something.

Verb

• To move downwards, to fall, to drop.
• To become weaker or worse.
• To bend downward; to bring down; to depress; to cause to bend, or fall.
• To cause to decrease or diminish.
• To turn or bend aside; to deviate; to stray; to withdraw.
• To choose not to do something; refuse, forbear, refrain.
• To inflect for case, number and sometimes gender; more specifically, to recite all the different declined forms of a noun.
• To run through from first to last; to recite in order as though declining a noun.
• To reject a penalty against the opposing team, usually because the result of accepting it would benefit the non-penalized team less than the preceding play.

Related

Opposite words

• incline

Origin

• From Middle English declinen, and ultimately Latin declīnō, from de + clīnō, from Proto-Indo-European *ḱley- (English lean). The senses arrived from two separate pathways in Middle English:
• The grammatical sense came from Old English declīnian, which was borrowed directly from the Latin etymon.
• All senses except the grammatical sense were derived from those of Old French decliner. Old French itself borrowed the verb from Latin.