WORD OF THE DAY: TRANSPIRE
verb | tran-SPYRE
What It Means
Transpire is a formal verb that means “to happen,” or in other words “to take place or occur.” It can also mean “to come to light” or “to become known,” as in “It transpired that they had met previously.” In botany, to transpire is to give off or exude watery vapour especially from the surfaces of leaves.
// The monument will ensure that posterity will not soon forget the historic events that transpired on that day.
Examples of TRANSPIRE
“Since that first super-eruption, there have been two more of comparable size, roughly 1.3 million years ago and 630,000 years ago. If this trend continues, with mega-eruptions taking place every 600,000 to 700,000 years, then Yellowstone is due for another major event. But whether it happens tomorrow, in 50,000 years, or never transpires, no one can say.” — Randall K. Wilson, A Place Called Yellowstone: The Epic History of the World’s First National Park, 2024
Did You Know?
If you’re someone who gets in a sweat over the now-common use of transpire meaning “to occur,” we hope this explainer helps you cool down and breathe easier—it just so happens that the word’s expansion from its technical origins transpired in a logical, or at least understandable, progression over the centuries. Transpire comes from the Latin verb spirare (“to breathe”), which also breathed life into perspire, aspire, and inspire, among other words.
Wafting up into English in the late 16th century, transpire was originally used (as it still is) for the action of vapor passing out of the pores of a living membrane such as the skin. From this use followed the related senses of “to become known” and “to be revealed; to come to light” (think of information “leaking” or “slipping out”). Although some usage commentators maintain that these are the only proper figurative uses of transpire, none other than Abigail Adams used it to mean “to happen” in a 1775 letter to her husband (“there is nothing new transpired since I wrote you last”) and Noah Webster recognised the new sense in his dictionary of 1828. Today it is firmly established as standard, occurring widely in published prose.
Merriam Webster Dictionary
