Degeneration

How to spell degeneration

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce degeneration

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does degeneration mean?

1. nounThe process of declining or deteriorating from a healthier, higher, or more functional state.

Degeneration in a sentence

• The specialist explained that macular degeneration was slowly affecting her central vision.

• Critics warned of a steady degeneration in public standards at the council.

Where does degeneration come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb degenerare, which literally meant to fall away from one's birth or kind, built from the prefix de- (down or away from) and genus (birth, race, or kind). To the Romans the verb carried a moral charge: to degenerate was to disgrace one's noble ancestry by sinking below the quality one was born to. The related noun degeneratio passed into English by way of French in the late 1500s, and for a long time it kept that sense of decline from a former standard, whether of character, society, or breeding. Over the 1800s medicine borrowed it for the gradual physical breakdown of tissue, cells, or organs, giving us phrases such as macular degeneration. The same genus root sits inside familiar relatives like generate, genus, and gene, and remembering that family helps fix the single central -e- in gener and the -tion ending of this longer form.

How the word is built

• de- (down, away from)
• gener (from Latin genus: birth, kind, race)
• -ation (noun of process)