What's the difference between alight and descend?

Alight


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To spring down, get down, or descend, as from on horseback or from a carriage; to dismount.
  • (v. i.) To descend and settle, lodge, rest, or stop; as, a flying bird alights on a tree; snow alights on a roof.
  • (v. i.) To come or chance (upon).
  • (a.) Lighted; lighted up; in a flame.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Alighting upon the final four songs recorded by Drake, he pressed play and began to make notes before setting about mixing them for this putative release.
  • (2) The promise of exclusive photos and an "official chatroom" doesn't exactly set our world alight – but White is also promising subscribers four 7" records, four 12" records and four new T-shirts a year.
  • (3) Others wrecked the villa interior, poured fuel on the floor and set it alight.
  • (4) Villas of government officials were set alight and gunfire erupted in several districts of the city.
  • (5) (An official report later concluded that one of the men had set the van alight, killed the other and then himself.)
  • (6) That expectation was realized, with passengers from the oldest age groups having the highest relative frequency of accidents and vehicles with three steps being involved in a disproportionately large share of boarding and alighting accidents.
  • (7) In the small hours of the previous morning, an attacker had forced open a shutter, broken a window and set the inside alight .
  • (8) "I could be an MP…" And it suddenly occurs to me that Gardiner might just have alighted on the perfect profession for his skills.
  • (9) In a running confrontation, both sides threw molotov cocktails, one of which set alight a makeshift barricade in the foyer.
  • (10) Didcot resident Steve Shadbolt told the Oxford Mail that he looked across at the power station and realised that one of the towers was alight: “It burnt so fiercely that it spread to the next one ... it was quite a blaze.” The energy secretary, Ed Davey, said: “First, I want to thank the emergency services who are at Didcot working to tackle the blaze.
  • (11) Some of these new converts have alighted upon the basic income as an answer to our fragmenting welfare state.
  • (12) Cars were set alight and there were unconfirmed reports of petrol bombs being thrown.
  • (13) Falun Gong groups overseas dispute that - and in 2011 a man set himself alight near the site of the car crash.
  • (14) Tens of thousands of hectares of forest have been alight for more than two months as a result of slash and burn – the fastest and quickest way to clear land for new plantations.
  • (15) Photograph: Guim “The men shouted as they walked through the station having alighted from the train a short time earlier.
  • (16) Brotherhood spokesmen denied responsibility for the fires, but the local people everywhere say that it was groups of Brothers who attacked the buildings and set them alight.
  • (17) The young Somali woman who set herself alight on Nauru – the second refugee in a week to do so – has been taken to Australia by air ambulance, but her situation remains critical.
  • (18) On Rupert Murdoch's Fox News channel, the conservative commentator Sean Hannity recently alighted upon the case of Gordon Cook, a security manager from Merseyside, who used superglue to stick a loose crown into his gum because he was unable to find an NHS dentist.
  • (19) (" Setting a children's hospital alight is hitting the all time low.
  • (20) Bales acknowledged setting the bodies alight with a kerosene lantern.

Descend


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To pass from a higher to a lower place; to move downwards; to come or go down in any way, as by falling, flowing, walking, etc.; to plunge; to fall; to incline downward; -- the opposite of ascend.
  • (v. i.) To enter mentally; to retire.
  • (v. i.) To make an attack, or incursion, as if from a vantage ground; to come suddenly and with violence; -- with on or upon.
  • (v. i.) To come down to a lower, less fortunate, humbler, less virtuous, or worse, state or station; to lower or abase one's self; as, he descended from his high estate.
  • (v. i.) To pass from the more general or important to the particular or less important matters to be considered.
  • (v. i.) To come down, as from a source, original, or stock; to be derived; to proceed by generation or by transmission; to fall or pass by inheritance; as, the beggar may descend from a prince; a crown descends to the heir.
  • (v. i.) To move toward the south, or to the southward.
  • (v. i.) To fall in pitch; to pass from a higher to a lower tone.
  • (v. t.) To go down upon or along; to pass from a higher to a lower part of; as, they descended the river in boats; to descend a ladder.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The adjacent gauge was separated from the ischemic segment by one large nonoccluded diagonal branch of the left anterior descending artery.
  • (2) They insist this is the best way of ensuring the country does not descend into chaos before the final withdrawal of combat troops.
  • (3) The primary afferent fibers diverge in the brainstem into a short ascending and a long descending tract.
  • (4) A case of dissecting hematoma involving the left main, left anterior descending, and left circumflex coronary arteries is described in a patient who had received vigorous closed-chest cardiac resuscitation.
  • (5) Concerning the descending influences, it was found that stimulation of the anterior hypothalamus evokes depressor reactions, whereas stimulation of the posterior hypothalamus results in pressor reactions.
  • (6) Martin O’Neill spoke of his satisfaction at the Republic of Ireland’s score draw in the first leg of their Euro 2016 play-off against Bosnia-Herzegovina – and of his relief that the match was not abandoned despite the dense fog that descended in the second half and threatened to turn the game into a farce.
  • (7) This column is located ventral and lateral to the dorsolateral division of the trigeminal motor nucleus, and just medial to the descending trigeminal nerve rootlets.
  • (8) Blunt trauma to the epigastrum may result in a retroperitoneal hematoma involving the head of the pancreas and descending duodenum.
  • (9) Acute coronary angiography showed myocardial bridging and total occlusion of the left anterior descending artery in the middle one-third of its course.
  • (10) In acute experiments on 16 dogs the anterior descending branch of the left coronary artery was stenosed to produce a hypokinesia or dyskinesia of the anterior wall of the left ventricle.
  • (11) Descending neurons have opposite structural polarity, arising in the brain and terminating in segmental regions of the fused ventral ganglia.
  • (12) To perform this technique, it is necessary to expose only a longitudinal segment on the anterior aspect of the aneurysm to permit a ventriculotomy parallel to the anterior descending coronary artery 4-5 cm away.
  • (13) To explore relations between preload, afterload, and stroke volume (SV) in the fetal left ventricle, we instrumented 126-129 days gestation fetal lambs with ascending aortic electromagnetic flow transducers, vascular catheters, and inflatable occluders around the aortic isthmus (n = 8) or descending aorta (n = 7).
  • (14) A new centrifugal pump (Sarns), originally designed for ventricular assist, was successfully used in two patients during repair of traumatic pseudoaneurysm of the descending thoracic aorta.
  • (15) The special advantage of the UV-beam is that it allow to inactivate selectively of the particular elements of nuclear apparatus of living ciliates is to observe consequences of operation on distant descendants of irradiated cell.
  • (16) By LHRH treatment 36 testes (20.5%) reached the scrotum, when HCG was added in unsuccessful cases 47 other gonads (26.8%) descended.
  • (17) A Teflon cylinder was placed in the mid-left anterior descending coronary artery to create a 33% stenosis.
  • (18) The descending colon, which after the DMH treatment showed a significant increase in the levels of glycosidases, also gave rise to a larger number of adenocarcinomata than other parts of the colon.
  • (19) In work to determine whether X-radiation could be used to induce tumors of the colon in outbred Holtzman rats, a technique was devised so that only the descending colon could be irradiated with a collimated X-ray beam and tumorigenic exposures in the kilo-Roentgen range were delivered.
  • (20) At one, in the Gun and Dog pub in Leeds on Tuesday, a witness described how the meeting descended into chaos when one of the rebels smashed a glass and threatened to attack Griffin supporter Mark Collett.