Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The state or quality of being transient.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Transientness; also, that which is transient or fleeting.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The quality of being transient; transientness.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The quality of being transient, temporary, brief or fleeting.
  • noun An impermanence that suggests the inevitability of ending or dying.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun an impermanence that suggests the inevitability of ending or dying
  • noun the attribute of being brief or fleeting

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From transient + -ence

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Examples

  • Jane Simonsen, in her study of attempts to "domesticate" Native American women, writes that "implicit in this condemnation of gossip and transience is the suggestion that isolating women in their homes would keep them from speaking out in tribal councils, preserving rituals and stories, and maintaining kinship ties."

    "Make It Yourself": Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890-1930 2006

  • "I like the idea of transience, perishing, loneliness," he said during the installation.

    Fresh Designs From Berlin Fashion Week Mary M. Lane 2011

  • "In some ways I'm jealous of writers whose work is grounded in place, because mine feels more grounded in transience, which is probably in part due to my sense of Northern Virginia, and to a lesser extent D.C., as a place," she says.

    Danielle Evans, an author straddling racial divides DeNeen L. Brown 2010

  • "In some ways I'm jealous of writers whose work is grounded in place, because mine feels more grounded in transience, which is probably in part due to my sense of Northern Virginia, and to a lesser extent D.C., as a place," she says.

    Danielle Evans, an author straddling racial divides DeNeen L. Brown 2010

  • According to Mr. Davies, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus pioneered the idea of transience, but it pervades the Christian tradition.

    Sovereignty and the Pitiless Passage of Time Henrik Bering 2012

  • 'I like the idea of transience, perishing, loneliness,' said the designer.

    Berlin Fashion Week 2011

  • When it comes to mono no aware in cinema, very few directors seemed to express the concept as successfully as Yasujiro Ozu, who frequently examined the idea of transience within the family unit across a number of great classics, perhaps most successfully through a thematic trilogy of films that is often referred to as

    DVD Times 2010

  • Ken’s the same way on pretty much all accounts although I don’t know if the transience is a factor.

    Archive 2008-12-07 Dayle A. Dermatis 2008

  • Ken’s the same way on pretty much all accounts although I don’t know if the transience is a factor.

    How did this happen?! Dayle A. Dermatis 2008

  • Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering — a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies … systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”

    paranoia in american politics 2009

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