Descent

1. n. A passing from a higher to a lower tone.
2. n. The act of descending, or passing downward; change of place from higher to lower.
3. n. Incursion; sudden attack; especially, hostile invasion from sea; — often followed by upon or on; as, to make a descent upon the enemy.
4. n. Progress downward, as in station, virtue, as in station, virtue, and the like, from a higher to a lower state, from a higher to a lower state, from the more to the less important, from the better to the worse, etc.
5. n. Derivation, as from an ancestor; procedure by generation; lineage; birth; extraction.
6. n. Transmission of an estate by inheritance, usually, but not necessarily, in the descending line; title to inherit an estate by reason of consanguinity.
7. n. Inclination downward; a descending way; inclined or sloping surface; declivity; slope; as, a steep descent.
8. n. That which is descended; descendants; issue.
9. n. A step or remove downward in any scale of gradation; a degree in the scale of genealogy; a generation.
10. n. Lowest place; extreme downward place.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.