descent (di SENT)
A downward incline or passage; a slope: "The hikers found the descent on the mountain trail very dangerous due to loose rocks."
dissent (di SENT)
To differ in opinion or feeling; to disagree: "The two members of government would often dissent with each other about legal matters, but they continued to be good friends."
1. To increase, to enlarge, or to intensify: "The President was trying to escalate the number of troops in Iraq."
2. To increase in intensity or extent: "The democrats have had a deepening long-term impasse with President Bush that is certain to escalate.”
1. A moving staircase; a device consisting of revolving stairs that conveys people non-vertically to a higher or lower level.
2. A set of moving steps attached to a continuously circulating belt, that carries people up or down between levels in a building.
3. A stipulation in a contract that relates an increase or decrease in something to a change in something else; that is, relating compensation to cost of living or prices to sales.
4. Etymology: from 1900, American English, a trade name of an Otis Elevator Co. "moving staircase", coined from
escalade, a borrowing from about 1600 from Middle French, where it meant "an assault with ladders on a fortification" (from Latin
scala, "ladder") +
-ator in
elevator.
The verb escalate is a 1922 back-formation that came into general use with a sense of "raise" after 1959. Escalation in the figurative sense is from 1938, as well as the reference to a battleship arms race among world military powers.
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