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From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Declension \De*clen"sion\, noun [Apparently corrupted fr. F. d['e]clinaison, fr. L. declinatio, fr. declinare. See {Decline}, and cf. {Declination}.]
1. The act or the state of declining; declination; descent; slope.
The declension of the land from that place to the sea. --T. Burnet.
2. A falling off towards a worse state; a downward tendency; deterioration; decay; as, the declension of virtue, of science, of a state, etc.
Seduced the pitch and height of all his thoughts To base declension. --Shak.
3. Act of courteously refusing; act of declining; a declinature; refusal; as, the declension of a nomination.
4. (Gram.) (a) Inflection of nouns, adjectives, etc., according to the grammatical cases. (b) The form of the inflection of a word declined by cases; as, the first or the second declension of nouns, adjectives, etc. (c) Rehearsing a word as declined.
Note: The nominative was held to be the primary and original form, and was likened to a perpendicular line; the variations, or oblique cases, were regarded as fallings (hence called casus, cases, or fallings) from the nominative or perpendicular; and an enumerating of the various forms, being a sort of progressive descent from the noun's upright form, was called a declension. --Harris.
{Declension of the needle}, declination of the needle.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
declension
noun
1: the inflection of nouns and pronouns and adjectives in Indo-European languages
2: process of changing to an inferior state [syn: {deterioration}, {decline in quality}, {worsening}]
3: a downward slope or bend [syn: {descent}, {declivity}, {fall}, {decline}, {declination}, {downslope}] [ant: {ascent}]
4: a class of nouns or pronouns or adjectives in Indo-European languages having the same (or very similar) inflectional forms; "the first declension in Latin"
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:
149 Moby Thesaurus words for "declension": IC analysis, abnegation, accidence, affix, affixation, allomorph, bound morpheme, cascade, catabasis, cataract, chute, collapse, comedown, conjugation, contradiction, crash, cutting, debacle, debasement, decadence, decadency, deceleration, declination, declinature, decline, decline and fall, declining, decrescendo, defluxion, deformation, degeneracy, degenerateness, degeneration, degradation, demotion, denial, depravation, depravedness, depreciation, deprivation, derivation, derogation, descending, descension, descent, deterioration, devolution, difference of form, dilapidation, diminuendo, disagreement, disallowance, disclaimer, disclamation, disobedience, dissent, dive, down, downbend, downcome, downcurve, downfall, downflow, downgrade, downpour, downrush, downtrend, downturn, downward mobility, downward trend, drop, dropping, dwindling, dying, ebb, effeteness, enclitic, fading, failing, fall, falling, falling-off, formative, free form, gravitation, holding back, immediate constituent analysis, inclination, infix, infixation, inflection, involution, lapse, loss of tone, morph, morpheme, morphemic analysis, morphemics, morphology, morphophonemics, nay, negation, negative, negative answer, nix, no, nonacceptance, noncompliance, nonconsent, nonobservance, paradigm, plummeting, plunge, pounce, prefix, prefixation, proclitic, radical, rapids, recantation, refusal, regression, rejection, remission, repudiation, retention, retreat, retrocession, retrogradation, retrogression, root, ruination, slippage, slowdown, slump, stem, stoop, subsidence, suffix, suffixation, swoop, theme, thumbs-down, turndown, unwillingness, wane, waterfall, withholding, word-formation
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