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downward

adverbadjectiveattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈdaʊnwəd//
  • United States//ˈdaʊnwɚd//
  • //ˈduːnwɐd//

Toward a lower level, whether in physical space, in a hierarchy, or in amount or value.

adverb

  1. 1

    Toward a lower level, whether in physical space, in a hierarchy, or in amount or value.

    His position in society moved ever downward.

    The natural disasters put downward pressure on the creditworthiness of the nation’s insurance groups.

    [A] ring the county wears, / That downward hath succeeded in his house / From son to son, some four or five descents

    They call her Daffadill: / Whoſe preſence as ſhe went along, / The prety flowers did greet, / As though their heads they downward bent, / With homage to her feete.

  2. 2

    At a lower level.

    Dagon his Name, Sea Monster, upward Man / And downward Fish […]

  3. 3

    Southward.

    If we turn to the New World, we find that among the American Indians, from the Eskimo of Alaska downward to Brazil and still farther south, homosexual customs have been very frequently observed.

Etymology

Etymology tree English down Proto-Indo-European *wert-der. Proto-Germanic *wardaz Old English -weard English -ward English downward From down + -ward.

adjective

  1. 1

    Moving, sloping or oriented down.

    He spoke with a downward glance.

    But this foul, grim, and urchin-snouted boar, Whose downward eye still looketh for a grave, Ne’er saw the beauteous livery that he wore;

    […] in the Western Sky, the downward Sun Looks out illustrious from amid the Flush Of broken Clouds […]

    Emerging into the hill-road, Kemp naturally took the downward direction […]

  2. 2

    Located at a lower level.

    In her chast Current oft the Goddess laves, And with Celestial Tears augments the Waves. Oft in her Glass the musing Shepherd spies The headlong Mountains and the downward Skies, The watry Landskip of the pendant Woods, And absent Trees that tremble in the Floods;

    1793, Thomas Taylor (translator), The Phædo in The Cratylus, Phædo, Parmenides and Timæus of Plato, London: Benjamin and John White, p. 235, […] often revolving itself under the earth, [the river] flows into the more downward parts of Tartarus.

The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).