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Definition of "retrogress" []

  • To return to an earlier, inferior, or less complex condition. (verb-intransitive)
  • To go or move backward. (verb-intransitive)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Use "retrogress" in a sentence
  • "And in 1985, when Grace Bumbry was a sensation as Bess in a Metropolitan Opera production, she slammed the opera: "I thought it beneath me, I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come far too far to have to retrogress to 1935.""
  • "I'm not advocating that women retrogress to the brainless housewives of the '50s who spent afternoons baking macaroni sculptures and keeping Betty Crocker files."
  • "So while Black communities retrogress into crime, poverty and hopelessness, with Black families in tatters and living in a kind of pervasive chaos that exists on a day-to-day basis, these Black leaders offer carefully crafted “politically correct” speeches, sport natty Armani suits, and boast about how they are the only “Blacks on the block where white people live.”"