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

Yu Ji’s cement sculptures take the shape of contorted human bodies—not uncomfortable but limberly twisted and folded—that are missing limbs; their contrasting materials and postures at once suggest permanence and evanescence.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 13, 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

A part of it is the evanescence, that it disappears.

From Washington Post ● Oct. 18, 2021

A book not so much full of birds as full of evanescence, of blue-winged, trumpeting mysteries.

From "All the Light We Cannot See" by Anthony Doerr

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

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