say it: di-GREE
degree is a noun meaning "a position on a scale of intensity or amount or quality". It carries 7 recorded senses.
a specific identifiable position in a continuum or series or especially in a process
“a remarkable degree of frankness”
“at what stage are the social sciences?”
an award conferred by a college or university signifying that the recipient has satisfactorily completed a course of study
“he earned his degree at Princeton summa cum laude”
a measure for arcs and angles
“there are 360 degrees in a circle”
the highest power of a term or variable
a unit of temperature on a specified scale
“the game was played in spite of the 40-degree temperature”
the seriousness of something (e.g., a burn or crime)
“murder in the second degree”
“a second degree burn”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for degree come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.