1A person's old age, especially when regarded as the time when health, vigour, and mental faculties deteriorate.

1. 1.1 The period leading up to the end of an enterprise or institution.
   the declining years of the Austro-Hungarian empire

   Example sentencesExamples

   • He suggests at one point that the case could ‘form part of a study of the rule of law as practised in the declining years of the Soviet Bloc’.
   • Its titular heroine is a poor little rich girl, looking for, and ostensibly finding, Mr Right in Vienna during the declining years of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
   • The oral interpretation and discussion of the Mishnah went on, however, for some three hundred years, through the declining years of Roman law and the Roman empire, and the rise of Christianity.
   • And I suggest that what we're seeing at the moment is a central church bureaucracy out of control in the declining years of a long papacy, something for which there are numbers of historical precedents.
   • The title refers to a rebel army opposing official rule in the declining years of the Tang Dynasty.
   • The series of changes constituting the great disruption are often associated with the information age, but Fukuyama traces them further back, to the declining years of the Industrial era.
   • In the film, John Huston plays an aging film director named Jake Hannaford in the declining years of his career.
   • The Accord grew out of a period of industrial warfare, in the declining years of the Fraser government.
   • The nineteenth century saw in its declining years the growth of imperialism and the popular understanding of ‘the Empire’ as a new form of national identification.
   • No study of leadership is complete without a lesson in hubris, and no one did hubris quite like the British Empire, particularly in its declining years.
   • How does this show, even in its declining years, still manage to rack up such an assortment of cute men and women previously unbeknownst to the world at large?
   • Certainly their stark physical transformations and record-breaking exploits during what would normally be the final and declining years of a baseball career suggest as much.
   • In the opening pages of The Seduction of Place, his new book on the city, Anglo-American architect and historian Joseph Rykwert recounts his own formation during the declining years of the modernist movement.