spontaneously
Americanadverb
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naturally, without premeditation, prompting, or planning.
The author recounts how a fully-fledged exchange market economy emerged spontaneously in his POW camp.
These answers were given spontaneously to an open-ended question that did not offer response options.
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in an impulsive way.
It was so cold the other night that I spontaneously booked a trip to Turks and Caicos.
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by a natural process or from an internal force or cause.
A calf should normally stand spontaneously within 60–90 minutes of its birth.
The symptoms resolved spontaneously within 6 months of onset.
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of spontaneously
Explanation
When you do something spontaneously, you do it on a whim, without preparing for it or giving it much thought. If your math teacher spontaneously breaks into a tap dance, it will surprise the whole class. Spontaneously belting out a song on the subway is very different from practicing over many weeks for a choral concert solo. Things that happen spontaneously aren't planned: improvisation in music or theater, for example, happens spontaneously. Spontaneously comes from the adjective spontaneous, with its Late Latin root spontaneus, "willing," or "of one's free will."
Vocabulary lists containing spontaneously
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
In simulations, GPT-6 spontaneously carried out cyberattacks at rates significantly higher than those observed for the other two interfaces.
From Barron's ● Sep. 29, 2026
Sea turtles have been sighted laying eggs on the sand in Huntington Beach — the first known instance of a sea turtle of any species spontaneously nesting on the U.S.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 22, 2026
Throughout the show, fans shook lightsticks, parroted Katseye's dance moves and, in some cases, spontaneously burst into tears.
From BBC ● Sep. 4, 2026
The descriptions of those incidents listed in a federal database are harrowing: A Kia minivan’s sunroof spontaneously exploded on a Wisconsin highway.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 30, 2026
The most interesting of these is the prediction that protons, which make up much of the mass of ordinary matter, can spontaneously decay into lighter particles such as antielectrons.
From "A Brief History of Time: And Other Essays" by Stephen Hawking
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
