All 5 Uses

progressive
in
How to Read Literature Like a Professor
(Auto-generated)

Our independent and progressive heroine, Adela Quested (does that name strike you as symbolic at all?)†
Chpt 12 *
She has a progressive-wasting disease, while he is prematurely aged and decrepit, his hair nearly gone and his nerves shot.†
Chpt 13
The great threat to a slave was that he might be sold down the river, where things got progressively worse the farther south you went, and he's floating straight into the teeth of the monster.†
Chpt 19 *
His imagination runs through history, digging its way down into the past to unlock clues to political and historical difficulties, in much the same way the turf-cutters carve their way downward through progressively older layers of peat, where they sometimes come upon messages from the past—skeletons of the extinct giant Irish elk, rounds of cheese or butter, Neolithic quern stones, two-thousand-year-old bodies.†
Chpt 19
From here on her trip grows progressively darker.†
Chpt 27

Definitions:

(1) (progressive as in: progressive decline)
gradually advancing or becoming more severe
(2) (progressive as in: progressive ideas)
supporting new ideas and reforms, especially in politics, and less concerned about unintended consequences of changing evolved institutions
(3) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
Progressive tax refers to a system of taxation in which the percent of income taxed increases with higher income. The terms, progressive education or progressive school are sometimes used to refer to more modern educational techniques such as stressing experience and self-expression over rote learning. In 1924, there was a political party in the United States called the Progressive Party. For other more specialized senses (including meanings related to eyeglass lenses, music, and grammar), see a comprehensive dictionary or Wikipedia.