evanescence

After you lose a loved one, often you're gripped with a fear of evanescence, or the rapid fading from sight or memory of that person.

  • Pronunciation: /,iːvə'nesəns/
  • English description: the event of fading and gradually vanishing from sight
  • Synonyms: disappearance
  • Chinese Translation: 消逝(xiao1 shi4)
  • Spanish Translation: desaparecimiento
  • ORIGIN: Evanescence comes from the Latin evanescere meaning "disappear, vanish." Something that possesses qualities of evanescence, has a quality of disappearing or vanishing. The evanescence of a shooting star makes it hard to catch — it's there one moment and gone the next. Evanescence is a word typically used to describe an event that fades from sight or memory, or sometimes the fleeting quality of worldly success.

EXAMPLE SENTENCE:

  • Junk is converted into treasure by memory as a way of slowing our evanescence.
  • A book not so much full of birds as full of evanescence, of blue-winged, trumpeting mysteries.

*New word description, story and part of "EXAMPLE SENTENCE" are cited in Vocabulary.com