1. (n.) The inflection, change of endings of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives; as, he and him; they and them; the act or the state of declining; declination; descent; slope.
2. (n.) A falling off towards a worse state; a downward tendency; deterioration; decay; as, the declension of virtue, of science, of a state, etc.
3. (n.) Act of courteously refusing; act of declining; a declinature; refusal; as, the declension of a nomination.
4. (n.) Inflection of nouns, adjectives, etc., according to the grammatical cases.
5. (n.) The form of the inflection of a word declined by cases; as, the first or the second declension of nouns, adjectives, etc.
6. (n.) Rehearsing a word as declined.
Thesaurus Entries
IC analysis, abnegation, accidence, affix, affixation, allomorph, bound morpheme, cascade, catabasis, cataract, chute, collapse, comedown, conjugation, contradiction, crash, cutting, debacle, debasement, decadence, decadency, deceleration, declination, declinature, decline, decline and fall, declining, decrescendo, defluxion, deformation, degeneracy, degenerateness, degeneration, degradation, demotion, denial, depravation, depravedness, depreciation, deprivation, derivation, derogation, descending, descension, descent, deterioration, devolution, difference of form, dilapidation, diminuendo, disagreement, disallowance, disclaimer, disclamation, disobedience, dissent, dive, down, downbend, downcome, downcurve, downfall, downflow, downgrade, downpour, downrush, downtrend, downturn, downward mobility, downward trend, drop, dropping, dwindling, dying, ebb, effeteness, enclitic, fading, failing, fall, falling, falling-off, formative, free form, gravitation, holding back, immediate constituent analysis, inclination, infix, infixation, inflection, involution, lapse, loss of tone, morph, morpheme, morphemic analysis, morphemics, morphology, morphophonemics, nay, negation, negative, negative answer, nix, no, nonacceptance, noncompliance, nonconsent, nonobservance, paradigm, plummeting, plunge, pounce, prefix, prefixation, proclitic, radical, rapids, recantation, refusal, regression, rejection, remission, repudiation, retention, retreat, retrocession, retrogradation, retrogression, root, ruination, slippage, slowdown, slump, stem, stoop, subsidence, suffix, suffixation, swoop, theme, thumbs-down, turndown, unwillingness, wane, waterfall, withholding, word-formation
