degenerate
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Pronunciation: ipa: /dɪˈd͡ʒɛnəɹɪt/
ipa: /dɪˈd͡ʒɛnəɹeɪt/
Forms: form: more degenerate
form: most degenerate
Etymology: Learned borrowing from Latin dēgenerātus. See -ate (adjective-forming suffix) for more.
Senses: glosses: Having deteriorated, degraded or fallen from normal, coherent, balanced and desirable to undesirable and typically abnormal.
raw_tags: of qualities
examples: text: faint-hearted and degenerate king
ref: 1591, William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 3:
text: But what can Cato do
Againſt a World, a baſe degenerate World,
That courts the Yoke, and bows the Neck to Cæſar?
ref: 1712 (date written), [Joseph] Addison, Cato, a Tragedy. […], London: […] J[acob] Tonson, […], published 1713, →OCLC, Act I, scene i, page 2:
text: As you grew more degenerate and base, I sent you millions of the croaking race
ref: 1726, Jonathan Swift, Verses on St. Patrick's Well:
text: If my boy is not tempted to gamble at a fashionable card party he will never learn from the degenerate, blackleg gamblers in the joint.
ref: 1918, Alexander Corkey, The Vision of Joy, or When "Billy" Sunday Came to Town:
text: The author explores the gap between the degenerate, elitist society of the domes and the working population. He criticizes the world of luxury and ease that easily ignores the sufferings of the majority.
ref: 1985 February 2, Tim Broadbent, “Kindred Spirits (review)”, in Gay Community News, volume 12, number 28, page 10:
text: What are the odds that an alcoholic and degenerate gambler with no money management skills could survive in a city that ate addicts for lunch and dreams for dinner?
ref: 2013, Artie Lange, Crash and Burn:
glosses: Having lost good or desirable qualities; hence also having bad character or habits, base, immoral, corrupt.
raw_tags: of a person or system
examples: text: It is likely that the long evolutionary trajectory of Mycoplasma went from a reductive autotroph to oxidative heterotroph to a cell-wall–defective degenerate parasite. This evolutionary trajectory assumes the simplicity to complexity route of biogenesis, a point of view that is not universally accepted.
ref: 2013 March 24, Harold J. Morowitz, “The Smallest Cell”, in American Scientist, volume 101, number 2, archived from the original on 04 Jan 2017, page 83:
glosses: Having lost functionality in general.
examples: text: The genetic code is degenerate because a single amino acid can be coded by one of several codons.
glosses: Having multiple domain elements correspond to one element of the range.
raw_tags: of an encoding or function
examples: text: A degenerate circle, having radius zero, consists of a single point.
text: We now apply the geometrical construction explained in the appendix to the degenerate triangle ABC.
ref: 1921, A. Hay, “Phase Transformation and Phase Balancing”, in Journal of the Indian Institute of Science, volume 4, page 102:
topics: mathematics
sciences
glosses: Qualitatively different, usually simpler, than typical objects of its class.
topics: mathematics
sciences
glosses: Having multiple different (linearly independent) eigenvectors.
raw_tags: of an eigenvalue
topics: natural-sciences
physical-sciences
physics
glosses: Having the same quantum energy level.
Derived terms: degenerate conic
degenerately
degenerate matrix
degenerate matter
degenerateness
degenerative
hemidegenerate
neutron-degenerate matter
nondegenerate
non-degenerate
undegenerate