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.
Some 29 percent spontaneously named an economic concern when asked what they wanted congressional candidates to discuss, a Pew survey in June found.
From Barron's ● Oct. 8, 2026
BVR-19 forms spontaneously in aqueous solutions at room temperature, which lowers the amount of energy required to make it.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 4, 2026
And when Mr. Young abruptly left, he sent Mr. Stills a sardonic telegram: “Dear Stephen, funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● 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
I realized that if Salim had spontaneously combusted or slipped into a time warp, only twenty people would have got off.
From "The London Eye Mystery" by Siobhan Dowd
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Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
