Instant

How to spell instant

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce instant

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does instant mean?

1. adjectiveHappening or produced immediately, with no delay.
2. nounA precise moment or point in time.

Instant in a sentence

• adjective

  The new payment app gives instant confirmation of every transfer.

• noun

  For an instant the room fell completely silent.

• adjective

  She stirred a spoonful of instant coffee into the hot water.

• noun

  At that instant the alarm began to sound.

Where does instant come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Instant comes from the Latin instans, the present participle of instare, which meant 'to stand near' or 'to press upon', formed from the prefix in- ('upon, towards') and stare ('to stand'). Something that was standing right upon you was urgent and pressing, so the earliest English uses, arriving through Old French in the late 1300s, carried the sense of 'urgent' or 'insistent', a meaning that survives in the related word 'instance'. From the idea of a moment pressing immediately upon the present came the noun sense of a precise point in time, and later the adjective sense of happening at once, as in instant coffee. The root stare also gives us 'stand', 'stable', and 'constant', all sharing that idea of standing firm. The spelling is phonetically regular, though the final unstressed '-ant' is the main place a writer might hesitate between -ant and -ent.

How the word is built

• in- (upon, towards)
• -stant (from stare: to stand); literally 'standing close at hand', hence pressing or immediate