Diaphanous vs Ephemeral - What's the difference?
diaphanous | ephemeral |
Transparent or translucent; allowing light to pass through; capable of being seen through.
* 1899 , Joseph Conrad,
* 1999 , Nicholas Humphrey, A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness ,
* 2004 , , Margaret Maulden (translator), Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners ,
Of a fine, almost transparent, texture; gossamer; light and insubstantial.
* 1951', , Unpublished preface to a collection, '''2007 , Mark Richardson (editor), ''The Collected Prose of Robert Frost ,
* 1963', , quoted in '''1985 , Floyd Merrell, ''Deconstruction Reframed ,
Lasting for a short period of time.
* Vicesimus Knox
* Sir J. Stephen
* '>citation
(biology) Existing for only one day, as with some flowers, insects, and diseases.
(geology, of a body of water) Usually dry, but filling with water for brief periods during and after precipitation.
* 1986 , W.H. Raymond, "Clinoptilolite Deposit in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota, U.S.A.", in Y?ichi Murakami et al. (editors), New Developments in Zeolite Science and Technology (conference proceedings), Elsevier, ISBN 978-0-444-98981-9,
As adjectives the difference between diaphanous and ephemeral
is that diaphanous is transparent or translucent; allowing light to pass through; capable of being seen through while ephemeral is lasting for a short period of time.As a noun ephemeral is
something which lasts for a short period of time.diaphanous
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds.
page 96,
- But nonetheless the purpleness of the imagined purple cow will almost certainly be meaner, more diaphanous , more fleeting than any real-life purple that you ever saw: to imagine a purple cow is just not the same thing as to have a purple sensation (or at least a purple sensation worth the name).
page 98,
- The evening mist, drifting among the leafless poplars, veiled their silhouettes with a violet film, paler and more translucent than the most diaphanous gauze that might have caught in their branches.
page 169,
- The most diaphanous wings carry a burden of pollen from flower to flower.
page 67,
- What is amazing is that "a concept that is created by mind itself, the sequence of integers, the simplest and most diaphanous thing for the constructive mind, assumes a similar aspect of obscurity and deficiency when viewed from the axiomatic angle" (Weyl, 1963, 220).
Synonyms
* (allowing light to pass through) translucent * delicate, insubstantialAntonyms
* (transparent or translucent) opaque * concrete, solidephemeral
English
(wikipedia ephemeral)Synonyms
* (short-lived) ephemeronAdjective
(en adjective)- Esteem, lasting esteem, the esteem of good men, like himself, will be his reward, when the gale of ephemeral popularity shall have gradually subsided.
- sentences not of ephemeral , but of eternal, efficacy
- It was during an access of this kind that I suddenly left my home, and bending my steps towards the near Alpine valleys, sought in the magnificence, the eternity of such scenes, to forget myself and my ephemeral , because human, sorrows.
page 80:
- The graben constitutes a depositional basin and a topographic low, underlain by Cretaceous shales, in which volcanic debris accumulated in ephemeral lakes and streams in Oligocene and early Miocene time.