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TRANSITORY
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I. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Lasting a very short time
Example:
fugacious blossoms
Synonyms:
ephemeral; fugacious; passing; short-lived; transient; transitory
Classified under:
Similar:
impermanent; temporary (not permanent; not lasting)
Derivation:
transitoriness (an impermanence that suggests the inevitability of ending or dying)
Context examples:
The fact is, after my conflict with and victory over Mrs. Reed, I was not disposed to care much for the nursemaid's transitory anger; and I was disposed to bask in her youthful lightness of heart.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
Unjust!—unjust! said my reason, forced by the agonising stimulus into precocious though transitory power: and Resolve, equally wrought up, instigated some strange expedient to achieve escape from insupportable oppression—as running away, or, if that could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)
