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evanescent

UK/ɛvəˈnɛs(ə)nt/US/ˌɛvəˈnɛsənt/
adjectiveC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Evanescent means vanishing almost as soon as it appears. An evanescent scent.

It suggests something lovely rather than merely brief, which is what separates it from short-lived. Evanescent is used in physics of a wave that dies away within a tiny distance.

Definitions of evanescent

  1. 1adjectiveevanescentVanishing almost as soon as it appears.C2

    “The evanescent colours of the sunset faded before she could take a photo.”

evanescent is a quality.

Where it comes from

Latin evanescere, to vanish, from vanus, empty, the same root as vain and vanish.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *h₁weh₂- — to abandon, leave

  2. Latin

    ēvānēscēns — disappearing, vanishing

  3. French

    évanescent — evanescent

  4. English, today

    evanescent

Built from

  • ēvānēscō · Latin — to disappear, vanish; to die out, fade away; to lapse
  • vānēscō · Latin — to vanish
  • vānus · Latin — empty, vacant, void

Borrowed from French évanescent (“evanescent”), from Latin ēvānēscēns (“disappearing, vanishing”), present participle of ēvānēscō (“to disappear, vanish; to die out, fade away; to lapse”), from ē- (variant of ex-) + vānēscō (“to vanish”) (from vānus (“empty, vacant, void”), from Proto-Indo-European h₁weh₂- (“to abandon, leave”)) + -ēscō).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

evanescent in the wild

  • A hallmark of an evanescent field is that there is no net energy flow in that region.

    Evanescent field

  • The constituent quark, in contrast, is a combination of both the "naked" current quark and its "dressing" of evanescent gluons and virtual quarks.

    Current quark

  • ATR uses a property of total internal reflection resulting in an evanescent wave.

    Attenuated total reflectance

  • Dual-polarization interferometry (DPI) is an analytical technique that probes molecular layers adsorbed to the surface of a waveguide using the evanescent wave of a laser beam.

    Dual-polarization interferometry

  • Modified rational approximants that can suppress the evanescent modes are now available.

    Beam propagation method

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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.

Related words

the vānus family

vainvanish

evanescent — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others