evanescent

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 21, 2016 is: evanescent • \ev-uh-NESS-unt\  • adjective : tending to vanish like vapor Examples: "As stunning as his dishes could be, in the end, the maestro understood its evanescent nature. Furstenberg remembers Richard telling him, 'It's supposed to be food.'" — Tom Sietsema, The Washington Post, 15 Aug. 2016 "I think because we are young, issues we encounter with mental health are often excused as evanescent, and therefore not something to be taken seriously." — Morgan Hughes, The Marquette Tribune (Marquette University), 6 Sept. 2016 Did you know? The fragile, airy quality of things evanescent reflects the etymology of the word evanescent itself. It derives from a form of the Latin verb evanescere, which means "to evaporate" or "to vanish." Given the similarity in spelling between the two words, you might expect evaporate to come from the same Latin root, but it actually grew out of another steamy Latin root, evaporare. Evanescere did give us vanish, however, by way of Anglo-French and Vulgar Latin. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.