progression

UK/pɹəˈɡɹɛʃn̩/US/pɹəˈɡɹɛʃən/

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,341 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: progressions

Progression is a steady advance from one stage to the next. Career progression, disease progression, a chord progression.

In medicine it is a neutral technical term for a condition getting worse, which is why the phrase no progression is good news. In music a chord progression is the sequence a song moves through, and four chords will carry a surprising number of songs.

Definitions of progression

1nounprogressionA steady advance from one stage to the next.B2+
“Her progression from junior clerk to company director took just ten years.”

progression is an advance.

Where it comes from

Latin progressio comes from progredi, to go forward — pro plus gradi, to step.

Latin
prōgressiō
Old French
progression
Middle English
progressioun
English, today
progression

From Middle English progressioun, from Old French progression and its etymon Latin prōgressiō. by surface analysis, progress + -ion.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

progression in the wild

The twelve-bar blues (or blues changes) is one of the most prominent chord progressions in popular music.
Twelve-bar blues
The blues progression has a distinctive form in lyrics, phrase, chord structure, and duration.
Twelve-bar blues
The constant difference is called common difference of that arithmetic progression.
Arithmetic progression
For instance, the sequence 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15,... is an arithmetic progression with a common difference of 2.
Arithmetic progression
In a musical composition, a chord progression or harmonic progression (informally chord changes, used as a plural, or simply changes) is a succession of chords.
Chord progression

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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.

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