english word · 2026-09-18

ephemeral

adjective

Meaning

Describing data, processes, or infrastructure that are temporary and intended to exist only for a short duration before being discarded. In coding, it often refers to state or environments that do not persist after a task is completed.

Etymology

From the Greek 'ephemeros', meaning 'lasting only a day'.

Examples

"We should use an ephemeral environment for the pull request preview so we don't waste cloud resources."

"Since the container is ephemeral, any logs stored locally will be lost once the pod restarts."

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