latent
/ˈleɪ.tənt/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.27 in modern English
6
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Lying dormant or hidden until circumstances are suitable for development or manifestation.
noun
The residue left by a person's finger that can be made visible by a process such as powder dusting; a latent fingerprint.
noun
An underlying cause that can be inferred from statistical correlations; factor.
noun
Anything that is latent.
Example Sentences
- "There is known latent demand for rail freight and the rail freight industry is working with Scottish businesses to develop new rail freight services, as environmental concerns are beginning to change the logistics choices of Scottish producers."
- "2008 July 2, Joe Palca, “Scientists Make Herpes Breakthrough”, abstract, All Things Considered, National Public Radio Those infected with a herpes virus are infected for life. That’s because the virus goes "latent." Sometimes, it awakes from its slumber, producing painful illnesses."
- "Once the latent prints have been visualized by the superglue and powder dusting techniques, they should be photographed again. Then the developed latents need to be lifted and placed on backing cards. The latent cards are documented by putting the case number, date and time of lifting, initials of person processing the evidence, and a sketch indicating the location of the lifted latent print on the back of the lift card, as shown in Photo 6.6."
- "Paralegal workers do not argue cases in court, and these crimescene fingerprint gatherers do not compare crime-scene latents to known prints of suspects and present their findings in court."
- "These kinds of latents define the invariant dispositional properties enabling prediction and control of the external environment. Finally, there are the latents that underlie manifestation as relationships of power, as cause to effect, condition to occurrence, or dependent variable to independent variable."
- "That is, the observed covariance between indicator y₁ and y₃ would mirror the understandable causal behavior of the corresponding underlying latents."
Etymology
From Middle English latent, latente, from Old French latent, from Latin latēns, present participle of lateō (“lie hidden”).