nascent

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 29, 2025 is:

nascent • \NASS-unt\ • adjective

Nascent is a formal word used to describe something that is just beginning to exist, or in other words, is recently formed or developed.

// The actress is now focused on her nascent singing career.

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Examples:

“I asked my father, recently, if I might borrow one of his old journals as research for a nascent writing project. It felt like there might be something there—in the poetry of varietal names (Beedy’s Camden Kale, Ruby Perfection Cabbage), or the steady plotless attention to the natural world.” — Fiona Warnick, LitHub.com, 9 May 2024

Did you know?

Nascent descends from the Latin verb nasci, meaning “to be born,” as does many an English word, from nation and nature to innate and renaissance. But rather than describing the birth of literal babies—as in pups, kits, hoglets, et al.—nascent is applied to things (such as careers or technologies) that have recently formed or come into existence, as when scholar Danille K. Taylor-Guthrie wrote of Toni Morrison being “an integral part of a nascent group of black women writers who would alter the course of African American, American, and world literature.”