How to Use evanescent in a Sentence

evanescent

adjective
  • Whatever haunts the images is out of the frame, and what’s in the frame is too diffuse or evanescent to build on.
    John Leland, New York Times, 31 Mar. 2017
  • Hollywood marriages can be as evanescent as the life span of mayflies.
    Peter Rainer, The Christian Science Monitor, 19 May 2017
  • This is probably wise; the inclusion of evanescent fads might only date the work.
    Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 26 July 2019
  • Mass reading has now been joined by mass writing: frequent, error-filled and evanescent—like speech.
    The Economist, 18 July 2019
  • That dance is evanescent might be its most significant aspect, just as it’s said that death gives meaning to life.
    Rumaan Alam, The New Republic, 18 Dec. 2019
  • The answer lies in the evanescent nature of choreography.
    Terry Teachout, WSJ, 18 Oct. 2017
  • Even the body, Ms. Tokarczuk suggests, is an uncertain, evanescent thing.
    Sam Sacks, WSJ, 9 Aug. 2018
  • So the story of 2019, in particular, was a tale of hot takes and takedowns buttressed by evanescent evidence.
    Walter Shapiro, The New Republic, 12 Mar. 2020
  • And, like all concept cars, an evanescent representation of a future that may have been, but never was.
    Brett Berk, Car and Driver, 24 May 2019
  • But what this reveals, particularly in the snowflake paintings, is an evanescent beauty very much like the delicate shapes that pass through ocean foam.
    Will Heinrich, New York Times, 13 June 2018
  • The big difference was that the painters tended to work rapidly so as not to miss the moment, whereas Debussy was painstaking, labouring to evoke evanescent subjects such as clouds and water.
    The Economist, 22 Feb. 2018
  • This is to try to capture and memorialize this volatile and evanescent mode of expression, with its references both obscure and shared by millions.
    Patrick Iber, The New Republic, 5 Aug. 2021
  • But even so evanescent a time of good feeling as that following 9/11 is difficult to imagine occurring today.
    Julian E. Zelizer, The Atlantic, 27 Aug. 2017
  • But from his vantage on the evanescent bridge to maturity, So is puzzling out some big questions, ones that might be exigent from different vantages at any age.
    Deborah Eisenberg, The New York Review of Books, 19 Aug. 2021
  • Morisot, in particular, was perfecting a visual language as intimate and evanescent as perfume in the 1870s.
    Washington Post, 7 June 2019
  • That show, to me, was quintessential Hammons—an evanescent but indelible experience, made out of nothing, with nothing for sale.
    Calvin Tomkins, The New Yorker, 2 Dec. 2019
  • The presence of executive producer Kirsten Dunst in the lead could help distributor A24 score some press and audience attention but this is the kind of evanescent arty fare that slips in and out of theaters with barely a soul noticing.
    Boyd Van Hoeij, The Hollywood Reporter, 3 Sep. 2017
  • And yet her recollections are evanescent, unstable, because the media have taken charge of memory and forgetting.
    Edmund White, New York Times, 19 Jan. 2018
  • Marienbad’ to the present moment; its ravishing surfaces, somehow both diamond-hard and evanescent, exist gloriously outside of time.
    Mark Olsen, latimes.com, 12 July 2019
  • For them, any evanescent illusion of societal metamorphosis has long since dissolved, along with the emotional intensity of that moment.
    Laura Collins-Hughes, New York Times, 21 May 2018
  • While businesses chase evanescent market trends and grapple with a fast-moving future, millennial mentors, as many companies call them, have emerged as a hot accessory for executives.
    The New York Times, NOLA.com, 15 Oct. 2017
  • But taking advantage of evanescent profit opportunities is what capitalism is all about.
    Peter Coy, Bloomberg.com, 18 July 2017
  • Basudha’s collection of 195 aromatic rice landraces has helped revive many evanescent local food cultures and traditional ceremonies.
    Debal Deb, Scientific American, 16 Oct. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'evanescent.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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