emergence
Pluralemergences (some meanings)
- 1The act of rising out of a fluid, coming forth from concealment, or rising into view; appearance.
The diver's emergence from the depths was greeted with applause from the boat.
The slow emergence of the moon over the ridge marked the start of the festival.
Similarappearance, rise, surfacing
Oppositedisappearance
- 2The process by which ordered structure or behavior arises in a complex system from the interactions of its simpler parts.
The emergence of consciousness from neural activity remains a deep puzzle for researchers.
Traffic jams can form through the emergence of patterns that no single driver intends.
Note
A specialist extension of the sense of rising into view: in complex-systems thinking, what surfaces is a pattern rather than a diver. The term carries a strong claim. The resulting structure cannot be reduced to, or predicted from, the parts taken one at a time. Its adjective travels with it, as in emergent structure and emergent behavior, and the noun usually takes of and from: the emergence of order from chaos.
- 3An outgrowth from a plant surface, such as a prickle or wart, arising from deeper tissue than a hair but from fewer layers than a spine.
Botanists classified the wart-like emergence as distinct from a true spine.
The cactus bore numerous emergences along its ridged surface.
Note
A botanist's term of art that sorts surface outgrowths by how deep they start. The test is the tissue of origin, not the outward look. A prickle counts as an emergence because it grows from the epidermis together with the layers just beneath it, whereas a hair comes from the surface cells alone. Here the word names a thing rather than an event, so it readily takes a plural.
Less common meaning
- 4A pressing situation demanding immediate action; an emergency.
In this dire emergence, the Marquis de Torcy, minister for foreign affairs, offered his services.
1790, Charles Hamilton, Transactions During the Reign of Queen AnneNote
Emergency and emergence are doublets, and for a time they meant the same thing. This one came into English through French émergence. Charles Hamilton writes of "this dire emergence" in 1790, and Frances Burney still looks for help "in any emergence" in 1812. Today the word for a crisis is emergency. When emergence turns up in older prose with this meaning, read it as a crisis, not an appearance.
Practice
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Origin
Borrowed from French émergence, and a doublet of emergency. By surface analysis, it can be read as emerge plus the suffix -ence.