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temporary

adjectivenouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈtɛmpəɹəɹi//
  • United Kingdom//ˈtɛmpəɹi//
  • United States//ˈtɛmp(əˌɹ)ɛɹi//
  • United States//ˈtɛmpəɹi//

Not permanent; existing only for a period or periods of time.

adjective

  1. 1

    Not permanent; existing only for a period or periods of time.

    Sally was put in temporary charge of the department while they searched for a full-time replacement.

  2. 2

    Existing only for a short time or short times.

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin temporarius, from tempus (“time”).

noun

  1. 1

    One serving for a limited time; a short-term employee, especially in an office.

  2. 2

    A short-term variable used to store an intermediate result.

Forms

plural
temporaries
comparative
more temporary
superlative
most temporary
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).