Word.ws English Dictionary

downward drift

downward drift noun: the phenomenon of people with mental illness moving ever downward along the social and economic scale after they reach adulthood and live independently.

Noun

downward drift (uncountable)

  1. The phenomenon of people with mental illness moving ever downward along the social and economic scale after they reach adulthood and live independently.
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see downward, drift.
    • Yesterday saw a downward drift in share prices and an upward surge in commodities.

Questions about downward drift

What does downward drift mean?
Downward drift means the phenomenon of people with mental illness moving ever downward along the social and economic scale after they reach adulthood and live independently.
What part of speech is downward drift?
Downward drift is a noun.

Words near downward drift in the dictionary

  1. downvotes
  2. downvoting
  3. downward
  4. downward dog
  5. downward dogs
  6. downward drift
  7. downward spiral
  8. downward spirals
  9. downward-facing dog
  10. downward-facing dogs
  11. downwardly

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: downward drift (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “downward drift.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/downward_drift. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.