Transparent means you can see straight through it. Window glass, cling film, a jellyfish, the lid on a takeaway box, a ruler that shows the line underneath it. Hold a transparent thing up and the world on the other side arrives unchanged.
The second sense is the one that fills the news: a transparent process is one anybody can watch from outside — open accounts, published minutes, decisions taken where people can see them. Every government promises transparency and few of them deliver it. There is a third and colder use: a transparent lie or a transparent excuse is one so obvious that everybody sees through it at once, and calling a person transparent means their feelings show on their face. Keep one word separate — glass that lets light through but blurs what is behind it is translucent, not transparent.
1adjectivetransparentClear enough to see straight through.~54%
“The box has a transparent lid.”
synonyms: clear, see-through
2adjectiveopenOpen to inspection, with nothing kept back.~42%
“The council promised a transparent selection process.”
synonyms: open, above board
3adjectiveobviousSo obvious that nobody is fooled by it.~4%
“It was a transparent attempt to change the subject.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 151 sentences found in the wild and placed 110 of them on a sense (41 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: see-through, clear
trans-PARENT → your PARENTS
Your parents walk into the kitchen made entirely of window glass. You can watch the coffee go down inside them, and see the car keys in a pocket and the wrapped birthday present held behind a back.
hooks ontoparents
Medieval Latin trānspārēns is a present participle — a thing caught in the middle of doing something. It is trans plus pareō, the same pareō sitting inside appear, glossed to come forth, to become visible. English had a word of its own for this once, þurhsīene, and the Latin one displaced it.
Medieval Latin
trānspārēns — transparent
English, today
transparent
Borrowed from Medieval Latin trānspārēns (“transparent”). Borrowed from Medieval Latin trānspārēns (“transparent”), present participle of transpareō, from Latin trans + pareō. Displaced native Old English þurhsīene.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA