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Glite Dictionary
📉 A decrease 📉 To become worse 🙅 To refuse ↘️ A downward slope ↘️ To slope down 🔤 To change word form
to decline

to decline

4 8.9
To change a noun or adjective form to show its role in a sentence
  • verb
  • /dɪˈklaɪn/
  • Specialized
translation icon : declinar
  • In Latin, students must learn how to decline nouns to indicate case and number.

Rather, the cardinal on is usually declined as a strong noun.

Examples

  • Rather, the cardinal on is usually declined as a strong noun.

    MIT OpenCourseWare

  • Many languages require you to decline pronouns to match the grammatical rules.

  • Imagine a student of a foreign language declining to learn vocabulary because he or she owns a dictionary.

    Academic text (2000)

  • PNC Bank ignores them all and references old rules and regulations when they decline a mortgage modification.

    Blog text (18)

  • The same is true for Groups 2 and 5; they both decline through the study period but differ dramatically in their intercepts, with Group 2 beginning at 3.97 and Group 5 at 2.47.

    Academic text (2010)

  • To properly speak Spanish, you need to decline adjectives according to gender.

Synonyms

to inflect
vsto decline
  • Specialized
1 6.7

Change the form of a word to show tense, number, or case

applies mainly to nouns pronouns and adjectives to show case or gender

Compounds

decline in quality
1 3.9

A fall in how good something is over time

Surface Forms

decline infinitive
declined past
declined past participle
declining present participle
declines third person singular

Etymology

Decline shares the same roots de- 'down' and clinare 'to bend', so in grammar it means to 'bend' a word into different forms. Think of 'bending' a noun to show its different endings, and that is why to decline a word means to change its form.