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.
It helped that Burnham was "natural" and happy to spontaneously appear in content, they told the BBC.
From BBC ● Jul. 23, 2026
Crowds had first gathered spontaneously on Thursday morning in support of Fedorov, a tech-savvy young minister whose efforts to modernise the armed forces often put him at odds with the military establishment.
From Barron's ● Jul. 20, 2026
Gallium is also valuable because it can dissolve other metals, making it useful for producing liquid metal catalysts and `self-assembling structures,' in which disordered materials spontaneously organize themselves into ordered forms.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 9, 2026
“The cost of living remains at the forefront of consumers’ minds; for the third straight month, over half of consumers spontaneously mentioned that high prices are weighing down their personal finances,” Hsu said.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 26, 2026
Now he was standing there saying that he willingly, spontaneously, had helped an old white man lift a huge, heavy crate.
From "Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison
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.
