Inchoate

 WORD OF THE DAY

inchoate / adjective / in-KOH-ut

Definition
1a: being only partly in existence or operation
1b: incipient
2a: imperfectly formed or formulated
2b: formless, incoherent

Examples

"Petrifying sights and sounds haunt her nights and inchoate shadows hover around her."
— Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times, 19 Aug. 2021

Prepper Camp was a castle built on emotion: fear of the inchoate other was so great that the survivalists felt justified in being prepared to kill other humans to protect their material goods.
— Krista Stevens, Longreads, 10 Aug. 2020

Did You Know?
Inchoate comes from inchoare, which means "to start work on" in Latin but translates literally as "to hitch up" (inchoare combines the prefix in- with the Latin noun cohum, which refers to the strap that secures a plow beam to a draft animal's yoke).
The concept of this initial step toward the larger task of plowing a field explains how inchoate came to describe something (as a plan or idea) in its early, not fully formed, stages of development.