English edit

Etymology edit

Back-formation from declension

Verb edit

declense (third-person singular simple present declenses, present participle declensing, simple past and past participle declensed)

  1. (grammar, rare) To decline (to inflect for case and number).
    • 1900, José Lerchundi, Rudiments of the Arabic-Vulgar of Morocco:
      In moorish vulgar Arabic there is no true declensing because the final sings are suppressed; See page 13 N°- 30, one form alone being vulgarly used for all the cases in determinate as well as indeterminate nouns.
    • 2014, Nachum Dershowitz, Language, Culture, Computation: Computational Linguistics and Linguistics: Essays Dedicated to Yaacov Choueka on the Occasion of His 75 Birthday:
      I reckon that Lichtenstein had found a Latin genitive abdimi ('of Abdim') but thought it was in the nominative case, not yet declensed in the genitive, and that the person's name was Abdimi, so he applied yet again a Latin genitival suffix.