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degrade

UK/dɪˈɡɹeɪd/US/dɪˈɡɹeɪd/
verbC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,659 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: degraded, degrading, degrades

To degrade is to lower in quality, or to treat with contempt. Degrade the signal, degrade the soil, degrading treatment.

In law, degrading treatment is prohibited absolutely alongside torture, and the bar is that it humiliates or debases a person. In chemistry and engineering it is neutral: a material degrades over time, and biodegradable plastic is meant to.

Definitions of degrade

  1. 1verbdegradeTo lower in quality, or to treat with contempt.C1

    “The prisoners were degraded by being forced to wear rags and sleep on the floor.”

degrade is a lowering.

Where it comes from

Latin degradare means to reduce in rank — de, down, plus gradus, a step.

  1. Middle French

    dégrader

  2. English, today

    degrade

From Middle French dégrader.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

degrade in the wild

  • Cells use the monomers released from breaking down polymers to either construct new polymer molecules or degrade the monomers further to simple waste products, releasing energy.

    Catabolism

  • An update could degrade, or changing to an older version could be an upgrade.

    Upgrade

  • While HFCs do not degrade the ozone layer to the same degree as the compounds they replace, they still contribute to global warming.

    Hydrofluorocarbon

  • Whereas the degradation of PET by natural (non-enzymatic) means will take hundreds of years, PETases can degrade it in a matter of days.

    PETase

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • degradation