descend
part of speech
verb (descend, descends, descended, descending)
meaning for a pupil
1) To descend is to go or come down, or to move downwards. tree →
2) To be descended from someone means to come from them in your family history (to be their great-great-grandchild, and so on). tree →
3) To descend on a place means to arrive there suddenly in large numbers. tree →
sense in the lessons
In maths, descending order means from the biggest to the smallest (9, 7, 4, 2). In science and geography, planes descend to land and climbers descend a mountain. In history and family trees, people are descended from their ancestors. Phrases: descend the stairs, descending order, be descended from, descend on.
examples
- The plane began to descend towards the airport. tree →
- We carefully descended the steep hill. tree →
- Put these numbers in descending order: 3, 8, 5. tree →
- She is descended from a family of sailors. tree →
- Night descended on the town. tree →
- Hundreds of fans descended on the stadium. tree →
- The divers descended to the bottom of the lake. tree →
- She then descended from the chariot and made her reverence. tree →
note
Regular verb: descended, descending. Noun: descent (going down) and descendant (a person in your family who comes after you). Spelling: «sc» in the middle: de-SCEND. Opposite: ascend. Maths trap: ascending order is smallest to biggest; descending is biggest to smallest.
In the corpora
- Birds are living dinosaurs, descended from small feathered meat-eating dinosaurs, and there are about 11,000 kinds of birds alive today.
- Tegumai to his Tribe: «Can't a man break his carp-spear without the whole countryside descending on him?
- Birds are descended from dinosaurs.
- And the LORD descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD.
- And it shall hail, in the downfall of the forest; but the city shall descend into the valley.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «descend» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.