Meanings
plural ephemerons · plural ephemera
- 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 - computingA 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
Synonyms & antonyms
nounanything short-lived, as an insect that lives only for a day in its winged form
Synonym sets from Open English WordNet, CC BY 4.0.
Origin
- Ancient Greekἐφήμερον
- Englishephemeron
Borrowed from Ancient Greek ἐφήμερον (ephḗmeron), neuter form of ἐφήμερος (ephḗmeros).
More words from Ancient Greek
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
ephemeron. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/ephemeron
“ephemeron.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/ephemeron. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “ephemeron,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/ephemeron.
Source: ephemeron on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.