slope

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• intransitive verb To diverge from the vertical or horizontal; incline: synonym: slant.
• intransitive verb To move or walk.
• intransitive verb To cause to slope.
• noun An inclined line, surface, plane, position, or direction.
• noun A stretch of ground forming a natural or artificial incline.
• noun A deviation from the horizontal.
• noun The amount or degree of such deviation.
• noun The rate at which an ordinate of a point of a line on a coordinate plane changes with respect to a change in the abscissa.
• noun The tangent of the angle of inclination of a line, or the slope of the tangent line for a curve or surface.
• noun Offensive Slang Used as a disparaging term for a person of East Asian birth or ancestry.

from The Century Dictionary.

• Inclined or inclining from a horizontal direction; forming an angle with the plane of the horizon; slanting; aslant.
• noun An oblique direction; obliquity; slant; especially, a direction downward; as, a piece of timber having a slight slope.
• noun A declivity or acclivity; any ground whose surface forms an angle with the plane of the horizon.
• noun Specifically— In civil engineering, an inclined bank of earth on the sides of a cutting or an embankment. See grade, 2.
• noun In coal-mining, an inclined passage driven in the bed of coal and open to the surface: a term rarely if ever used in metal-mines, in which shafts that are not vertical are called inclines. See shaft and incline.
• noun In fort., the inclined surface of the interior, top, or exterior of a parapet or other portion of a work. See cut under parapet.
• noun In mathematics, the rate of change of a scalar function of a vector, relatively to that of the variable, in the direction in which this change is a maximum.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun An oblique direction; a line or direction including from a horizontal line or direction; also, sometimes, an inclination, as of one line or surface to another.
• noun Any ground whose surface forms an angle with the plane of the horizon.
• noun The part of a continent descending toward, and draining to, a particular ocean.
• noun (Geom.) the direction of the plane.
• adjective Sloping.
• adverb obsolete In a sloping manner.
• transitive verb To form with a slope; to give an oblique or slanting direction to; to direct obliquely; to incline; to slant
• intransitive verb To take an oblique direction; to be at an angle with the plane of the horizon; to incline.
• intransitive verb Slang To depart; to disappear suddenly.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun An area of ground that tends evenly upward or downward.
• noun The degree to which a surface tends upward or downward.
• noun mathematics The ratio of the vertical and horizontal distances between two points on a line; zero if the line is horizontal, undefined if it is vertical.
• noun mathematics The slope of the line tangent to a curve at a given point.
• noun The angle a roof surface makes with the horizontal, expressed as a ratio of the units of vertical rise to the units of horizontal length (sometimes referred to as run). For English units of measurement, when dimensions are given in inches, slope may be expressed as a ratio of rise to run, such as 4:12 or an an angle.
• noun vulgar, highly offensive A person of Chinese or other East Asian descent.
• verb To tend steadily upward or downward.
• verb colloquial To try to move surreptitiously.
• verb military To hold a rifle at a slope with forearm perpendicular to the body in front holding the butt, the rifle resting on the shoulder.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun the property possessed by a line or surface that departs from the horizontal
• noun an elevated geological formation
• verb be at an angle