Incipient

ɪnˈsɪpiənt

adjective

in an initial stage; beginning to happen or develop

The word 'incipient' is often used to describe something that is just starting to appear or become noticeable. It is derived from the Latin word 'incipiens', which means 'beginning'.

His back had gone reddish, although with exertion or incipient sunburn she couldn't tell.

King, Stephen

The Stand

The murky gray light of incipient dawn was cold not only in the poetical sense but also in a very literal way - and even in the then turbulent state of the Foundation's politics, no one, whether Actionist or pro-Hardin found his spirits sufficiently ardent to begin street activity that early.

Asimov, Isaac

Foundation 1 - Foundation

Within the first few months of her return to her parents' home, Ammu quickly learned to recognize and despise the ugly face of sympathy. Old female relations with incipient beards and several wobbling chins made overnight trips to Ayemenem to commiserate with her about her divorce. They squeezed her knee and gloated. He was a photogenic man, dapper and carefully groomed, with a little man's largish head. He had an incipient second chin that would have been emphasized had he looked down or nodded. In the photograph he had taken care to hold his head high enough to hide his double chin, yet not so high as to appear haughty.

Arundhati Roy

The god of small things

Ah!" she broke off on a deep breath; for a faint vibration, less of light than of air, a ripple of coming life, had begun to flow over the sky and the opposite mountains, hushing every incipient sound.

Edith Wharton

Hudson River Bracketed

The tiny networks of wrinkles around the corners of her mouth were gone. So were the incipient turkey-wattles beneath her neck and the sag of flesh which had begun to hang from her upper arms. She had been crying this morning and was radiantly happy tonight, but Ralph knew that couldn't account for all the changes he saw.

Stephen King

Insomnia

Sometimes I grew alarmed at the wreck I perceived that I had become; the energy of my purpose alone sustained me: my labours would soon end, and I believed that exercise and amusement would then drive away incipient disease; and I promised myself both of these when my creation should be complete.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901 : of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

James Joyce

Ulysses

Of the white men only Sandy and five others found themselves that afternoon looking down upon the railway, with aching limbs, and eyes filmed with weariness, and heads that throbbed and swam in incipient heatstroke.

John Buchan

The Courts of the Morning

There was, God knows, seclusion enough for monastic scholarship, but the rare romantic quality of the atmosphere, the prodigal opulence of Springtime, thick with flowers and drenched in a fragrant warmth of green shimmering light, quenched pretty thoroughly any incipient rash of bookishness.

Thomas Wolfe

Look Homeward, Angel

He was small, as I have said; I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his face, with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and great apparent debility of constitution, and—last but not least—with the odd, subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. This bore some resemblance to incipient rigour, and was accompanied by a marked sinking of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic, personal distaste, and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms; but I have since had reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in the nature of man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Our lights were now full on, and it must indeed have been a strange and vivid picture which presented itself to his gaze in that tiny chamber of death, where one man lay senseless and two others glared out at him with the twisted, contorted features of dying men, cyanosed by incipient asphyxiation.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The Maracot Deep

I told him all about the spinning wheel, and the story of my long quest after it, and added, "I am entirely of your opinion; it is no use my becoming virtually an agent for the mills. That would do more harm than good to the country. Our mills will not be in want of custom for a long time to come. My work should be, and therefore is, to organize the production of handspun cloth, and to find means for the disposal of the khadi thus produced. I am, therefore, concentrating my attention on the production of khadi. I swear by this form of Swadeshi, because through it I can provide work to the semi-starved, semi-employed women of India. My idea is to get these women to spin yarn, and to clothe the people of India with khadi woven out of it. I do not know how far this movement is going to succeed; at present it is only in the incipient stage. But I have full faith in it. You will thus perceive that my movement is free from the evils mentioned by you."

Mahatma Gandhi

The Story of My Experiments with Truth

The one new point which appears to have struck many readers is, "That natural selection is incompetent to account for the incipient stages of useful structures."

Charles Darwin

The Origin of Species

And in the midst of wailing women and the incipient labor of my mother who had been pushed into it by grief and the tearing of Mary Pereira's hair there was a knock; a servant announced Doctor Schaapsteker; who handed my grandfather a little bottle and said, "I make no bones about it: this is kill or cure. Two drops exactly; then wait and see."

Salman Rushdie

Midnight's Children: A Novel

"Tell Inspector Grant that I want to see him," he said to the minion, who was doing his best to look obsequious in the great man's presence, but was frustrated in his good intention by an incipient embonpoint which compelled him to lean back a little in order to preserve his balance, and by the angle of his nose which was the apotheosis of impudence.

Josephine Tey

The Man in the Queue

'What the hell are you talking about?' he pleaded in incipient panic.

Heller, Joseph

Catch-22