biodegrade

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Physical & chemical processes
absorbable
absorptive
absorptive capacity
absorptivity
acidification
aerate
endothermic reaction
excitability
excitation
excite
exergonic
exothermic
impregnate
re-emit
reabsorb
react
reboil
recondense
scald
vaporize

degrade | American Dictionary

degrade
verb[ T ]

degradeverb[T] (REDUCE)

us/dɪˈɡreɪd/
to reduce the quality of something:
degrading water/air quality
degraded sound quality
The state is funding projects to restore degraded wetlands.
chemistry, physicsus/dɪˈɡreɪd/
A substance that degrades changes to chemical structures that are more simple.

degradeverb[T] (LESSEN WORTH)

us/dɪˈɡreɪd/
to cause someone to seem to be worth less and lose the respect of others:
His depiction in the movie degrades him.

degrade | Business English

degrade
verb[ I or T ]
uk /dɪˈɡreɪd/us
to become worse in quality, or to make something worse:
Unlike with a cassette player, the sound of the MP3 Player doesn't degrade as the battery weakens.

Examples of degrade

degrade
Thus, (15a) and (15c) are also seriously degraded.
They demanded respect for their social rights and not to be degraded to the role of being recipients of poor relief.
Their presence supports the possibility that secreted proteins are partially degraded during the culture period.
In the clear (no-noise) condition [m] vs. [n] proved to be the hardest discrimination but performance was not degraded much further in noise.
Experiments showed that the efficiency gain in parsing time and grammar size was notable, and yet the goodness in probabilistic grammars was barely degraded.
If rapid changes are presented to the system, their representation in the model domain will be degraded, often resulting in poor synthesis quality.
The degree to which the tracking ability degrades is a function of the degree of risk aversion and the amount of risk.
Timevarying currents and magnetic fields in superconductors however, generate thermal energy, degrading their ability to conduct supercurrents.
As aqueous levels are reduced by microbial action, the cells 'squeeze' additional substrate from the organic sponge, until the target molecule has been completely degraded.
On the other hand, both enzymes degraded human serum proteins (albumin and fibrinogen) with approximately equal efficiency under the conditions of our assays in vitro.
Restrictions on daily living were reinforced by deteriorating public space, a product of abandoned buildings, degraded infrastructure, and the loss of local businesses.
Bedding surfaces may contain relatively coarse, heavily weathered, volcanic clasts, degraded ash particles and mica flakes.
In the absence of calcium, cadherins undergo a conformational change and are rapidly degraded.
Together they are capable of degrading all components of the extracellular matrix.
Choosing 2 mm does not change the results although it degrades the statistics.
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These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.