Meaning of retrograde | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Directed or moving backwards in relation to the normal or previous direction of travel; retreating.
2. Reverting to an inferior or less developed state; declining, regressing.
3. Of an animal: appearing to regress to a less developed form during its lifetime.
4. Of the order of something: inverse, reverse.
5. Having a passage of music played backwards.
6. Of ideas or a person: opposing social reform, favouring the maintenance of the status quo; conservative.
7. Involving a return to or a retracing of a previous course of travel.
   archaic
8. Counterproductive to a desired outcome; contradictory, contrary.
   archaic
9. Of a celestial body orbiting another: in the opposite direction to the orbited body's spin.
10. Of a celestial body: seeming to move across the sky in the opposite direction from its ordinary movement.
    also, often, postpositional
11. Of a metamorphic change: resulting from a decrease in pressure or temperature.
12. Of amnesia: relating to the period leading up to the episode which caused it.
13. Of verse: reading the same forwards or backwards; palindromic.
    archaic

Equivalents

Examples

“retrograde ideas, morals, etc.”

“Such retrograde people still exist, resisting modernity, dragging their feet.”

“[…] in the form of the pussyfooted Alexis Smith. While referring to [Cole] Porter's 1946 film (alleged) biography, Night and Day, she mentions there were "certain aspects of the story which at that time they could not do." Was "certain aspects" a euphemism for gay? Smith's misplaced politeness here is truly retrograde.”

“In going back to school in Wittenberg, / It is most retrograde to our desire: / And we beseech you, bend you to remain”

“Mercury retrograde”

“The inauspicious connotations of Mercury retrograde are actually quite old, evidenced in an ancient branch of astrology known as horary astrology.”

CEFR level