Time, Fate & Memory — C1 English Vocabulary

Using time, fate & memory words in English

Words for brevity and duration look like free variants and are not: fleeting, transient and ephemeral carry different registers and different implications. The page also flags impending, which can only be used of unwelcome things — a restriction nothing in the dictionary definition prepares you for — and settles continual against continuous.

What to watch out for

• Fleeting, transient, ephemeral, momentary

  Fleeting is the everyday word for something gone almost at once: a fleeting glance. Momentary is neutral and measurable — lasting a moment. Transient is more technical and is used of populations, states and phenomena: a transient population. Ephemeral is literary and carries a note of beauty in the brevity: the ephemeral pleasures of the season.

• Impending is only for bad things

  You can write impending doom, an impending crisis, impending redundancies — but an impending holiday sounds wrong to a native ear, because the word carries a threat. The neutral alternatives are forthcoming, upcoming and approaching. Imminent is close to impending and stresses that it is very soon; it too tilts negative but less strongly.

• Continual, continuous, perpetual, untimely

  Continuous means without any break at all; continual means repeatedly, with gaps: continual interruptions, a continuous line. Perpetual means going on forever, and interminable means so long it feels endless — a complaint, not a measurement. Note that untimely does not mean badly timed in general; it means too early, and it is most often used of death.

Words learners mix up

This page holds three quite different vocabularies that happen to share a subject. One orders events in time, one claims to know the future, and one describes the work of remembering — and each has a pair that learners routinely merge.

Collocations that sound natural

Time words are heavily idiomatic, and several appear almost exclusively in a single phrase. These are the ones worth storing whole rather than assembling.

• retrospect

  in retrospectwith the benefit of retrospecta retrospective view

  Effectively confined to in retrospect, which means looking back with knowledge you did not have then. The adjective retrospective is far freer, and has a legal sense of applying to the past.

• hark back

  hark back toharking back to an earlier era

  Always with back and always with to. From hunting, where hounds were called back to pick up a lost scent, and it can carry a hint that the looking back is nostalgic rather than useful.

• juncture

  at this juncturea critical junctureat a difficult juncture

  A formal word for a point in time, and it hardly ever appears without at. At this juncture is the formal register’s version of now, common in official statements.

• hiatus

  a brief hiatusafter a long hiatuson hiatus

  A gap or pause in something that then resumes. Latin, with the plural hiatuses in English, and on hiatus is now standard for a series or band that has paused.

• perpetuate

  perpetuate a mythperpetuate inequalityperpetuate the cycle

  To make something continue, and it is nearly always used of things that should not — the objects it takes in real texts are overwhelmingly negative.

• commemorate

  commemorate an anniversarya service to commemoratecommemorative plaque

  Transitive with no preposition. Distinguish it from celebrate: you commemorate a battle or a disaster, where celebrating would be grotesque.

See the full C1 collocations list →

Formal, neutral or informal?

Several of these words are archaic, several are literary, and a few are simply misused often enough that using them correctly is itself a signal. This is where to check before borrowing one.

• ephemeralLiterary · admiringLasting a very short time, with an implication that the brevity is part of the beauty. Originally biological — an ephemeral insect lives one day — and in general prose it is a considerably more elegant word than brief.
• erstwhileFormal · datedFormer. Attributive only, and old enough to sound deliberately literary; former does the same work invisibly. It is not a synonym for meanwhile, which is a common slip.
• yesteryearLiterary · nostalgicTimes past. Almost always in the snows of yesteryear or the stars of yesteryear, and it arrives with nostalgia attached, so it cannot be used neutrally for a date.
• thenceforthArchaic · legal survivalFrom that time onwards. Genuinely archaic outside legal drafting and historical narrative, where it still appears. From then on is the ordinary equivalent.
• primordialFormal · scientific or literaryExisting from the very beginning. Technical in primordial soup, and figurative for something deep and ancient in human nature, where it lends considerable weight.
• serendipitousPositive · often overstatedComing about by a happy accident, specifically finding something valuable while looking for something else. That precision is worth keeping — used as a synonym for lucky, the word loses what makes it useful.
• fortuitousContestedStrictly, happening by chance, with no implication that the chance was good. The sense of fortunate is now common enough to be standard, but careful readers still hear it as an error, so the safest use is where both readings hold.
• hereafterFormal · legal or religiousFrom now on, in a document — and, as a noun, life after death. The legal use is alive in contracts, and the religious use makes it a heavy word to reach for in ordinary prose.

Sentences to try

Four frames about time. Check the connotation before you swap any word.

• The improvement proved fleeting.
• The firm is preparing for an impending regulatory change.
• In retrospect, the warning signs were obvious.
• Continual interruptions made the session useless.

Questions about time, fate & memory vocabulary