degeneracyn.
/dɪˈdʒɛnərəsi/ 1.
a. The condition or quality of being degenerate.
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society > morality > moral evil > moral or spiritual degeneration > [noun]
degeneration?1481
declining1526
declination1533
depravation1561
villainy1564
declension1597
depravedness1623
decadency1632
degenerateness1640
depravity1643
depravement1645
degradation1663
degeneracy1664
degenerousness1678
marasmus1681
debasednessa1720
decadencea1734
demoralization1797
downgrade1857
decadentism1949
the mind > goodness and badness > badness or evil > worse > [noun] > degeneracy
degeneration?1481
degeneracy1664
1664 H. More Modest Enq. Myst. Iniquity 206 This grand Degeneracy of the Church.
1711 J. Addison Spectator No. 65. ¶9 It is Nature in its utmost Corruption and Degeneracy.
1862 E. M. Goulburn Thoughts Personal Relig. 117 A degeneracy from the scriptural theory of Public Worship.
1883 J. A. Froude Short Stud. IV. v. 336 The fall of a nobility may be a cause of degeneracy, or it may only be a symptom.
b. An instance of degeneracy; something that is degenerate. rare.
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1678 R. Cudworth True Intellect. Syst. Universe i. iii. 133 We incline..to account this Form of Atheism..to be but a certain Degeneracy from the right Heraclitick and Zenonian Cabala.
1862 H. Alford Jrnl. 11 Mar. in Life, Jrnls. & Lett. (1873) ix. 345 The cathedral of Sens is a sad degeneracy from ours.
2. Physics.
a. A property of a quantized or an oscillatory system (see degenerate adj. 4a).
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1928 J. F. Shearer & W. M. Deans tr. Schrödinger Coll. Papers Wave Mech. 70 Multiplicity of the proper values corresponds to degeneracy in the theory of conditioned periodic systems and is therefore especially interesting for quantum theory.
1935 J. Dougall tr. M. Born Atomic Physics v. 108 When the relativistic variability of mass is taken into consideration, the degeneracy of the hydrogen atom is certainly removed in part, but the motion is still simply degenerate.
1971 Nature 23 Apr. 495/3 Interaction between the free oscillations [of the Earth] and the Earth's rotation removes degeneracy in the spherical harmonics of the same degree.
b. A property of a system of particles or ‘gas’ (see degenerate adj. 4b).
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1928 Proc. Physical Soc. 40 327 An example of degeneracy is provided by the free electrons in a metal even at normal temperature.
1958 J. B. Sykes tr. V. A. Ambartsumyan Theoret. Astrophysics xxxii. 544 Owing to the high ionisation inside the stars [sc. white dwarfs], the gas retains the properties of an ideal gas..up to densities of about 102 or 103 g/cm3; at higher densities a degeneracy sets in, at first of the electron gas, and later (for densities greater than 105 or 106 g/cm3) of the heavy particles.
Draft additions April 2011
Genetics. The property of the genetic code by which more than one type of nucleotide triplet may code for a particular amino acid. Also called redundancy.
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1958 F. H. C. Crick in Biol. Replication Macromolecules (Soc. Exper. Biol.) 158 More than one triplet of bases stood for a particular amino acid (degeneracy). In other words it was an overlapping degenerate triplet code.
1991 S. F. Mason Chem. Evol. xii. 226 Coding DNA mutations which are ‘silent’ or ‘synonymous’, owing to the code degeneracy, do not lead to any amino acid replacement in the corresponding protein.
2006 D. R. Forsdyke Evolutionary Bioinformatics vii. 127 The degeneracy of the code mainly relates to the third position of codons.
This entry has not yet been fully updated (first published 1894; most recently modified version published online March 2018).
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