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Fugacious vs Ephemeral - What's the difference?

fugacious | ephemeral |

As adjectives the difference between fugacious and ephemeral

is that fugacious is fleeting, fading quickly, transient while ephemeral is lasting for a short period of time.

As a noun ephemeral is

something which lasts for a short period of time.

fugacious

English

Adjective

(en adjective)
  • Fleeting, fading quickly, transient.
  • * 1906 , O. Henry, "", in The Four Million :
  • Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes.
  • * 1916 , George Edmund De Schweinitz, Diseases of the Eye , page 589:
  • Watering of the eye, conjunctival congestion, distinct catarrhal conjunctivitis, and deep-seated scleral congestions, sometimes fugacious , and often accompanied by intense headache
  • * 2011 , Michael Feeney Callan, Robert Redford: The Biography , Alfred A. Knopf (2011), ISBN 9780307272973, page xvii:
  • It may be that Redford's fugacious nature is not so mysterious, that it is studded in the artwork of the labs and the very stones of Sundance.

    Derived terms

    * fugaciously * fugaciousness

    ephemeral

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • Something which lasts for a short period of time.
  • Synonyms

    * (short-lived) ephemeron

    Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • Lasting for a short period of time.
  • * Vicesimus Knox
  • Esteem, lasting esteem, the esteem of good men, like himself, will be his reward, when the gale of ephemeral popularity shall have gradually subsided.
  • * Sir J. Stephen
  • sentences not of ephemeral , but of eternal, efficacy
  • * '>citation
  • 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.
  • (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, 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.

    Synonyms

    * (lasting for a short period of time) temporary, transitory, fleeting, evanescent, momentary, short-lived, short, volatile * See also

    Antonyms

    * (lasting for a long period of time) permanent, eternal, everlasting, timeless.

    Derived terms

    * ephemerally