Word.ws English Dictionary

ephemeron

ephemeron noun: something short-lived or transitory.

Noun

ephemeron (plural ephemerons or ephemera)

  1. Something short-lived or transitory.
    • Ah!—so frail are we—
      So like the brief ephemeron that wheels
      Its momentary round, we scarce can weep
      Our own bereavements, ere we haste to share
      The clay with those we mourn.1834, Lydia Sigourney, Poems, To the Memeory of a Young Lady, page 64
  2. A type of weak reference in a garbage collected programming language that does not permit an object to be kept alive by its finalizer.
    • 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.2020, KC Sivaramakrishnan et al., Retrofitting Parallelism onto OCaml

Forms of ephemeron

pluralephemerons
pluralephemera

Origin of ephemeron

Borrowed from Ancient Greek ἐφήμερον (ephḗmeron), neuter form of ἐφήμερος (ephḗmeros).

Questions about ephemeron

What does ephemeron mean?
Ephemeron means something short-lived or transitory.
What part of speech is ephemeron?
Ephemeron is a noun.
What is the plural of ephemeron?
The plural of ephemeron is ephemerons.

Words near ephemeron in the dictionary

  1. ephemerises
  2. ephemerist
  3. ephemerists
  4. ephemeroid
  5. ephemeroids
  6. ephemeron
  7. ephemerons
  8. ephemerophyte
  9. ephemerophytes
  10. ephemeropteran
  11. ephemeropterans

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ephemeron (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “ephemeron.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ephemeron. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.