A decedent is the legal term for a person who has died, from Latin decedere, to depart, on record in English since 1599. It looks one letter from decadent, but the two don’t share a root: decedent comes from cedere, to go, while decadent comes from cadere, to fall. They collided anyway in a 2013 New York estate case, where a decedent’s trust paid for her cat’s deliberately decadent lifestyle — and cut her nephews out entirely.