Descendant - descendent

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There is confusion about the two spellings descendant and descendent. The traditional view is precisely that descendant may be used for both the adjective and the noun, while descendent should only be used for archaic adjectival uses, notably in heraldry. This distinction appears to be disappearing: the two are increasingly interchangeable. Some of this may be transatlantic difficulties: A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (ed. Butterfield, 2015) says "In Br[itish] E[nglish] descendant is the noun and descendent is the adjective, but in Am[erican] E[nglish] each may be spelt -ant or -ent." (On-line Merriam-Webster says that descendent is "less common".)

AWE's advice to those writing academic English in British educational institutions is

Use descendant for both noun and adjective - although descending may be better as adjective.

Avoid descendent.
The noun 'a descendant' is the correlative of 'an ancestor' - "A person who descends from a particular progenitor, ancestor, or ancestral stock" (OED, 2015).