quiescent
adjective
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Hush your puppies and calm your kitties, it’s time to make much (tranquil) ado about quiescent. As you might expect from both its meaning and the sequence of its first four letters, quiescent shares roots with the far more common, and less formal, word quiet. In fact, short is the list of English words beginning "q-u-i-e" that have no kinship with quiet and its various relations suggestive of restfulness and calm. (Our unabridged dictionary lists only two: quiebracha and quiebrahacha, both rare variants of quebracho.) Today’s adjective quiescent traces back to the Latin verb quiēscere, meaning "to become quiet" or "to rest," and was possibly first used by Francis Bacon, who wrote in 1605 that "… as Aristotle endeavoureth to prove, that in all motion there is some point quiescent…" Way to bring it home, Bacon.
Synonyms
Examples of quiescent in a Sentence
Rudy Molinek, Smithsonian Magazine, 5 Aug. 2024
In 2019, a routine observation by the Zwicky scope noticed a previously unheralded quiescent galaxy called SDSS1335+0728, 300 million light-years away, suddenly brighten.
—Daniel Clery, science.org, 3 July 2024
Of the 86 galaxies that seemed to have shifted from quiescent to AGN, the researchers studied 18 with new observations using the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope.
—Daniel Clery, science.org, 3 July 2024
As children pass into their teens and young adulthood, asthma will often go quiescent.
—Jeffrey Kluger, TIME, 25 June 2024
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Cite this Entry
“Quiescent.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quiescent. Accessed 30 Nov. 2024.
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quiescent
adjective
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quiescent
adjective
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