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incipiently

incipiently

1 7.7
In a way that is just beginning to develop
  • adverb
  • /ɪnˈsɪpiəntli/
  • Formal
: incipientemente
  • During the incipiently warm spring days, flowers started to bloom and the landscape came alive.

Examples

  • As she picked up the pencil again, her incipiently drawn sketch showed early signs of creativity.

  • And it will be, presumably, some kind of cosmopolitan value, a tolerance of and sympathy for the way of life of another who is incipiently similar in limited ways, always different in total context.

    Academic text (1994)
  • As for the terms in which Les Demoiselles has been read, they have often been incipiently sexist, heterosexist, racist, and neocolonialist; so I will argue.

    Academic text (1994)
  • The first gift she purchased for her daughter was the crown, a silvery spiked affair whose bright points failed to distract the eye from the unformed but incipiently masculine features.

    Fiction book (1993)
  • That shift begins to take place in early Greek philosophy as the transformation of the mythological way of knowing the world, characteristic of Homer, into an incipiently philosophical way of knowing the world through natural genera in which the realm of nature is distinguished from the realm of the divine.

    Academic text (2017)
  • Goodwin's pagan was incipiently Christian and needed no longer to play the part of the diabolic pawn of Preston's "adultrous" lover destined for punitive pains.

    Academic text (2018)
  • The incipiently formed ideas in his mind began to take shape as he spoke about his vision.

Synonyms

emergently
vsincipiently
7.5

In a way that develops naturally without a plan

is about starting in a neutral or gradual way rather than suddenly

How Early

incipiently
  • Formal
1 7.7
initially
429 3.2
at first
∞ 1.0
early on
294 2.5

Surface Forms

incipiently positive

Morphology

incipiently = incipient (transparent) = incipient + ly

Formed by adding the adverbial suffix '-ly' to the adjective 'incipient', yielding the straightforward adverbial meaning.

Etymology

The word incipiently comes from the Latin incipere, which means 'to begin', and it shares the same root as inception, a word that means 'start'. So, incipiently describes something that is just beginning to develop.