Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 28th.
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Today's word is evanescent, spelled E-V-A-N-E-S-C-E-N-T.
Evanescent is an adjective.
It's a formal and literary word that describes something that only lasts a very short time.
Here's the word used in a sentence from Kirkus Reviews.
Franklin once sternly confiscated a customer's espresso and refunded his money because he took too long sipping it and thus
allowed the evanescent flavors to dissipate.
The word evanescent didn't appear in the English language out of thin air.
It comes from a form of the Latin verb evanescere, which means to fade away or to disappear.
Evanescere is also the ultimate source of our word vanish.
Given the similarity in spelling and meaning between the two words,
you might expect evaporate to trace back to evanescere as well, but its source is another steamy Latin root, evaporare.
While today evanescent is used to describe things that last only a short time,