evanescence

American  

[ev-uh-nes-uhns] / ˌɛv əˈnɛs əns /

noun

• evanescences
  plural

1. the quality of being fleeting or vanishing quickly; impermanence.

   the evanescence of dreams.

2. the act or fact of vanishing quickly.

   The target audience is left only with the dominant message after the evanescence of the advertisement.

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• evanescences
  plural

Etymology

Origin of evanescence

evanesc(ent) ( def. ) + -ence ( def. )

Explanation

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. 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 Sentences

See Examples For:

evanescence evanescences

And in the final pages of the “Farewell Address” movement, the work’s brief coda proves moving in its gentle evanescence.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 7, 2026

And when these apparitions vanish, the text’s overriding theme—of life’s evanescence but also its beauty—does finally dovetail with the ghostly images created by the technology.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 22, 2026

The book’s setting 30-odd years ago comes to dovetail with that age gap’s built-in sense of evanescence.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 7, 2023

Today, more than 22 years later, as I hear Fred’s name praised to the skies, but in terms rooted in the past tense, the reality of life’s evanescence comes home to me.

From Washington Post ● Dec. 10, 2021

When humans died, their souls clung invisibly to their bodies for as long as they could—a day or two—and then they lost their grip and were claimed by the natural pull of evanescence.

From "Strange the Dreamer" by Laini Taylor

He knew the loveliness in a profile, he saw always the evanescences of light upon light and purposeless things.

From Adventures in the Arts Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets by Marsden Hartley

Every artist knows that between the thought that first gave rise to his design, and each one which appears in it, there are innumerable intermediate evanescences of sensation which no man felt but himself.

From Literary Character of Men of Genius Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions by Isaac Disraeli