contemporary
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contemporary
- /kənˈtɛm.p(ə.)ɹə.ɹi/ UK
- /kənˈtɛm.p(ə.)ɹi/ UK, informal
- /kənˈtɛm.pəˌɹɛɹ.i/ US
Where it comes from
From Medieval Latin contemporārius, from Latin con- (“with, together”) + temporārius, an adjective derived from tempus (“time”).
adjective more contemporary · most contemporary
- From the same time period, coexistent in time; contemporaneous. A neighb'ring Wood born with himself he sees, / And loves his old contemporary trees.
- Modern, of the present age (shorthand for ‘contemporary with the present’). We live our lives in three dimensions for our threescore and ten allotted years. Yet every branch of contemporary science, from statistics to cosmology, alludes to processes that operate on scales outside of human experience: the millisecond and the nanometer, the eon and the light-year.
Similar: coetaneous, coeval, contemporaneous, coincident, contemporary, cotemporal, cotemporaneous
noun contemporaries
- Someone or something belonging to the same time period (as someone or something else) Cervantes was a contemporary of Shakespeare.
- Something existing at the same time.
- A rival newspaper or magazine. Annexation therefore was inevitable; but (as I have said above) it was not necessarily of prime importance in our national policy, and there has been no need to exaggerate—as I fear many of our contemporaries have exaggerated— […]
