retrograde

When Charlie Kirk was alive, his wife Erika had a retrograde role that was easy to understand.

From Salon ● Sep. 8, 2026

Until, that is, the play’s rather retrograde climax, when the playwright’s provocateur wildness goes limp.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 21, 2026

Some of the listed performers, including Bret Michaels, Milli Vanilli and Vanilla Ice, weren’t all that shocking given Trump’s retrograde pop music taste.

From Salon ● Jun. 7, 2026

The dreamy vistas of domestic arts, which may have once seemed frivolous, passé, even politically retrograde for some, become a source of deep allure for people of different political stripes.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 4, 2025

In that letter Jefferson had mentioned Adams in passing as a retrograde thinker opposed to all forms of progress, one of the “ancients” rather than “moderns.”

From "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" by Joseph J. Ellis

Sometimes it is said that the high retrogrades, or backs off to the west, allowing the storm track to come down the coast.

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 3, 2021

Known in our dancers’ nomenclature as “The King and Queen,” it is built primarily on one basic theme with its inversions, reversals and retrogrades.

From New York Times ● Sep. 8, 2015

He could goad the traditionalists beneath him, promote the "new thinkers," purge the retrogrades, and keep an eye out for obstructionism, sabotage, insurgency.

From Time Magazine Archive

All of the opera's other themes, accompaniments and leitmotifs are derived from endlessly ingenious extrapolations, inversions, retrogrades and other variations of the original row.

From Time Magazine Archive

They counteract the tendency to vulgarity, which is the great danger of a newly launched society, so that our social condition improves, rather than retrogrades, with every decade.

From Manners and Social Usages by Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

Fu ture productions which fail to measure up to its stiff standards of achievement may be considered to have retrograded.

From Time Magazine Archive

Since the last great century—the thirteenth—Christendom had retrograded.

From The South American Republics Part I of II by Thomas C. Dawson

After a month Mars will be at M′ and the earth at E′, so that in its apparent motion Mars will have retrograded to M2.

From Astronomical Lore in Chaucer by Florence M. Grimm

Of course there is no gain without a certain amount of loss, and while we have advanced in freedom we have retrograded in chivalry, deference, and courtesy.

From The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage Describing Modern Manners and Customs of Courtship and Marriage, and giving Full Details regarding the Wedding Ceremony and Arrangements by G. R. M. Devereux

Women had retrograded to the old circular idea; they had given up their pokes.

From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 by Various

“Similar retrograding blocks in the past have been associated with periods of colder and wintry weather in the Eastern U.S.,” meteorologist John Homenuk wrote on Twitter.

From Washington Post ● Nov. 29, 2022

The four boys were looking for possible routes of escape when Red’s brother decided that in arbitration lay his salvation from this swiftly retrograding dilemma.

From "The Great Santini" by Pat Conroy

Judging from appearances, however, it would seem that the town is not growing in population or business relations, but is rather retrograding.

From Equatorial America Descriptive of a Visit to St. Thomas, Martinique, Barbadoes, and the Principal Capitals of South America by Maturin Murray Ballou

It is either advancing or retrograding; we cannot hold without using.

From Pushing to the Front by Orison Swett Marden

Only a few seconds did he spend thus when he began retrograding, like a crab.

From Through Apache Lands by Edward Sylvester Ellis