different between ephemeron vs ephemeral

English

Etymology

Borrowed from Ancient Greek ???????? (eph?meron), neuter form of ???????? (eph?meros)

Noun

ephemeron (plural ephemera)

1. Something short-lived or transitory.
2. (programming) A type of weak reference in a garbage collected programming language that does not permit an object to be kept alive by its finalizer.
   • 2020, KC Sivaramakrishnan et al., "Retrofitting Parallelism onto OCaml"[1]:

     Beyond type safety, OCaml has several features that closely interact with the garbage collector. These include weak references, finalisers, ephemerons, and lazy values, whose semantics will have to be preserved with the new GC so as to not break programs that use those features.

Related terms

• ephemeral
• ephemeric

English

Etymology

From New Latin ephemerus, from Ancient Greek ???????? (eph?meros), the more common form of ????????? (eph?mérios, “of, for, or during the day, living or lasting but for a day, short-lived, temporary”), from ??? (epí, “on”) + ????? (h?méra, “day”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /??f?.m?.??l/, /??f?.m?.??l/
• Rhymes: -???l

Noun

ephemeral (plural ephemerals)

1. Something which lasts for a short period of time.

   Synonym: ephemeron

Derived terms

• spring ephemeral

Adjective

ephemeral (comparative more ephemeral, superlative most ephemeral)

1. Lasting for a short period of time.

   Synonyms: temporary, transitory, fleeting, evanescent, momentary, short-lived, short, volatile; see also Thesaurus:ephemeral

   Antonyms: permanent, eternal, everlasting, timeless

   • 1821-1822, Vicesimus Knox, Remarks on the tendency of certain Clauses in a Bill now pending in Parliament to degrade Grammar Schools

     Esteem, lasting esteem, the esteem of good men, like himself, will be his reward, when the gale of ephemeral popularity shall have gradually subsided.

   • 1853, James Stephen, Lecture on the right use of Books

     sentences not of ephemeral, but of eternal, efficacy
2. (biology) Existing for only one day, as with some flowers, insects, and diseases.
3. (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, 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.

Derived terms

• ephemerally

Related terms

• ephemera
• ephemeron
• ephemerality
• hemeral

Translations

Further reading

• ephemeral in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
• ephemeral in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.
• ephemeral on Wikipedia.Wikipedia