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emergence

UK/ɪˈmɜː.d͡ʒ(ə)ns/US/ɪˈmɝ.d͡ʒ(ə)ns/
nounC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,842 of 15,258mostly written

Emergence is the act of coming into view or into being. The emergence of a new party, emergence from lockdown, the emergence of resistance.

In science it has a precise and interesting sense: emergence is when a system shows behaviour none of its parts has, as an ant colony solves problems no ant understands. It is a doublet of emergency, from the same Latin verb.

Wilson Bentley · Public domain

Definitions of emergence

  1. 1nounemergenceThe act of coming into view or into being.C1

    “The emergence of smartphones changed the way people read the news.”

emergence is an appearing.

Where it comes from

Latin emergere means to rise out — e, out, plus mergere, to dip. Emergency is a doublet.

  1. French

    émergence

  2. English, today

    emergence

Borrowed from French émergence. a doublet of emergency. by surface analysis, emerge + -ence.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Word Building

Practise this word

emergence in the wild

  • The act of becoming a pupa is called pupation, and the act of emerging from the pupal case is called eclosion or emergence.

    Pupa

  • The election saw the emergence of the Whig Party, which succeeded the National Republican Party in the Second Party System as the primary opposition to the Democratic Party.

    1836 United States elections

  • Despite the emergence of the Whigs as a durable political party, Democrats retained the presidency and a majority in both houses of Congress.

    1836 United States elections

  • Hence it is easy to mark the stages of their progressive emergence by the aid of natural and artificial marks imprinted on them.

    Principles of Geology: or, The Modern Changes of the Earth and its Inhabitants Considered as Illustrative of Geology· Sir Charles Lyell

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

  • emerge
  • emergency