From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishdescend from somebody/something phrasal verb1 be descended from somebodySSFCOME FROM/ORIGINATE to be related to a person or group who lived a long time ago She claims to be descended from Abraham Lincoln. The people here are descended from the Vikings.2 COME FROM/ORIGINATEto have developed from something that existed in the past SYN come from ideas that descend from those of ancient philosophers → descend→ See Verb table
Examples from the Corpus
descend from • All Gauls claimed to be descended from him.• Man appears to be descended from patrilineal ancestors.• The family was an illegitimate branch of the Yorkshire Hoptons, being descended from Sir Robert Swillington by his mistress Joan Hopton.• For a split second, the noise that had been rising from stadium to sky descended from sky to stadium.• Then he walked back to the bridge site to meet his wife, who was coolly descending from the iron basket.• Guerrillas descended from the Lacandon Volcano in Quetzaltenago.• Because they were descended from them, many sometimes descending from a single ancestral species.be descended from somebody• The University of Edinburgh's most famous dropout, Charles Darwin, pointed out that human beings are descended from animals.• Stu's mother is descended from Cherokee Indians.• All Gauls claimed to be descended from him.• Through him the Merovingians can thus claim to be descended from Noah.• If you believe in evolution, you believe man is descended from primates, and primates are vegetarian.• One family has a Confederate cavalryman among its forebears, the other is descended from slaves.• Power still comes from a small block, two-valve push-rod V-8 whose principal architecture is descended from the 1953 original.• When he jokingly referred to the story that he was descended from the Devil he meant no disrespect to his ancestor Woden.• Because they were descended from them, many sometimes descending from a single ancestral species. 