Evanescent

 WORD OF THE DAY

evanescent / adjective / ev-uh-NESS-unt

Definition
: tending to vanish like vapor

Examples
"In both cases Viladrich makes you feel just how extraordinary it is to capture something as evanescent as a personality in a painting."
— Will Heinrich, The New York Times, 25 Mar. 2022

But from his vantage on the evanescent bridge to maturity, So is puzzling out some big questions, ones that might be exigent from different vantages at any age.
— Deborah Eisenberg, The New York Review of Books, 19 Aug. 2021

Did You Know?
The fragile, airy quality of things evanescent reflects the etymology of the word evanescent itself.
It derives from a form of the Latin verb evanescere, which means "to evaporate" or "to vanish."
Given the similarity in spelling between the two words, you might expect evaporate to come from the same Latin root, but it actually grew out of another steamy Latin root, evaporare.
Evanescere did give us vanish, however, by way of Anglo-French and Vulgar Latin.