Downhill

How to spell downhill

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce downhill

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does downhill mean?

1. adverbTowards the bottom of a slope; in a descending direction.
2. adverbInto a worse condition or steady decline.
3. adjectiveSloping or moving towards the bottom of a hill.

Downhill in a sentence

• adverb

  The cyclists coasted downhill without pedalling.

• adverb

  The company's profits went downhill after the recall.

• adjective

  The downhill stretch of road made the drive feel effortless.

• adverb

  The runaway trolley rolled downhill towards the car park.

• adverb

  His health started to slide downhill once he stopped exercising.

• adjective

  She entered the downhill skiing race at the resort.

Where does downhill come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English compound, joining the Old English adverb dun, meaning 'down' or 'off a height', with hyll, the Old English word for a raised piece of ground or hill. The 'down' element itself has a curious history: it derives from the phrase 'off the dun', where dun meant a hill or down, so 'down' originally signalled motion away from high ground. By the late medieval period the two words had fused into a single descriptive term for the slope or direction leading from higher to lower ground. From the literal sense of a descending slope came the figurative meaning of decline or deterioration, recorded from around the seventeenth century. Because both parts are common, plain English words, the spelling holds no real surprises beyond remembering it is written as one solid word.

How the word is built

• down (lower position)
• hill (raised ground); a transparent compound