GRE Vocabulary: Time and Change

A daylily flower is caducous, open at dawn and fallen by dusk.

On opening day the nascent library held one shelf of books and a stack of empty crates.

The volatile frost on the car hood vanished within minutes once the sun reached it.

Digital tide charts supersede the paper tables the harbor office used to nail on the wall.

A wristwatch on a figure in a painting of ancient Rome is an anachronism, because wristwatches did not exist then.

The ferry fare stayed static for a decade, the same price on every ticket.

The abrupt fall in barometric pressure happened within minutes, not over a long afternoon.

The abiding noon bell has sounded in the square for more than a century.

The fugitive shine on the wet street vanished as soon as the sun dried the stones.

Once the sample's collection date was logged, the lab treated that date as immutable, and no one was allowed to alter it.

The obsolescent film projector was still wheeled out for one class, though a digital player had already been ordered to replace it.

The office stopped stocking typewriter ribbons once typewriters were obsolete for its work.

The stone well will antecede the wooden chapel, which is to be raised beside it a century later.

The dimming of the house lights was a prelude to the concert, coming before the first note.

The subsequent census, taken ten years after the first, counted more houses in the same valley.

The pencil sketch was the antecedent of the finished map, drawn before any copy was inked.

The two lectures were concurrent, both starting at noon, so a student could attend only one.

The discontinuous brook ran after rain, dried to stones, and ran again after the next wet week.

The continuous drip from the cave ceiling kept a steady beat all night, never skipping a drop.

The perdurable right of way has no closing year, and the grant says it continues without a final date.

The diary pages were bound in chronological order, from the earliest year to the latest.

The inveterate damp in the cellar had stained the stones for decades, unlike a puddle wiped up the same day.

The interminable drought dragged through several growing seasons before regular rains returned.

The momentary green flash at sunset was gone in about a second.

A stopgap director managed the archive until a permanent director was hired the next spring.

The journal printed no issues during its two-year hiatus and then resumed on the old schedule.

The council set a one-season moratorium on new docks, pausing permits until spring.

The belated thaw came in April, weeks after this river usually clears of ice.

A premature frost in early September blackened the tomatoes before they had ripened.

With the last crate aboard and the gangway raised, the ship's departure was imminent.

After a stack of rejected titles, the eventual name of the bridge was the shortest one, chosen last.

December is the penultimate month of the calendar year.

The inaugural issue of the journal appeared in January, and the issues after it were numbered from that start.

The incipient crack in the plaster was only a hairline, the first break in a wall that had been smooth.

The inchoate schedule was a page of loose times, not yet a finished calendar.

Some whales have vestigial pelvic bones, small leftovers from four-legged ancestors.

The erstwhile train station is now a market, and no passenger train has stopped there for decades.

The earlier boundary ruling stood as a precedent when the court later decided a similar line.

The town's unprecedented lantern night was the first gathering of its kind there.

The town fair is biennial, held in even-numbered years and skipped in the years between.

The hebdomadal market opens every seventh day and does not wait a full year between meetings.

Episodic meteor notes appeared on scattered nights, with blank weeks when the log had none.

Iterative locust swarms returned to those fields in several different years, not in one year alone.

Successive bells marked the hours, each one ringing after the one before it.

The provisional timetable was used only until the council voted on a final one.

Once the solid rocket was ignited, that stage of the launch was irrevocable.

The impermanent camp stood for one weekend and was packed away on Monday.

The dormant seeds stayed inactive through winter and sprouted after the soil warmed.

The resurgent stream filled its banks again after the dry months had nearly emptied it.

Work on the pier was held in abeyance until the spring budget, with no crews on the site.

The city had to abridge the evening bus run, stopping it an hour earlier than before.

Reprinting the old map each year would perpetuate the coastline error the surveyors had already corrected.

The harvest festival will consummate the growing season, coming when the last crops are in.

In the northern hemisphere, days that keep lengthening after the winter solstice are a harbinger of spring.

The draft agreement was a precursor of the signed treaty, written several months earlier.

The catalog calls the two pottery styles coeval because shards of both styles lie in the same soil layer.

The two tower clocks were synchronous, striking noon at the same moment.

The antiquated signal still used a hand-cranked bell from an earlier railway era.

The moribund ferry line had one boat left, and that boat's final season was already posted.

The waning moon showed a thinner bright edge each night after the full moon.

After months in a cast, the unused leg muscle began to atrophy.

The river channel was in flux, shifting its sandbars after each major flood.

Marks on the boathouse recorded the vicissitude of the lake, high after snowmelt and low in late summer.

A butterfly's metamorphosis is the change from caterpillar to adult, not a small change of color.

The interregnum between directors lasted a month, and the office stood empty.

A sunny hour gave a brief respite from the cold rain that had fallen all morning.

Senescent leaves lose their green color and drop as the growing season ends.

The antediluvian card catalog still filled a cabinet, though the library had kept digital records for twenty years.

Primordial hydrogen formed in the first minutes after the Big Bang and is still the most abundant element.

The superannuated textbook still called Pluto the ninth planet, years after that classification had changed.

The composer's posthumous symphony was first heard the year after she died, and never in her lifetime.

The museum dates the 1845 house as antebellum because it was built before the American Civil War.

The recrudescence of the fever came after six days of a normal temperature.

The bridge design had a long gestation, with drawings revised for three years before any construction began.

The matutinal report was filed at dawn each morning, not saved for a rare holiday.

Even in a room without clocks or sunlight, the volunteers' sleep followed a circadian rhythm of about a day.

The diachronic study tracks the town's street names across two centuries instead of describing only one year.

The footpath is immemorial, older than the village's oldest written record.

The museum label calls the horse's extra toe atavistic, a return of a trait common in early horse ancestors.

The shift from each town's local sun time to standard time zones was a watershed for railroads, after which crews in a zone kept the same clock.

In the student play, the denouement came in the last scene, when the missing will was finally read.

The reservoir reached its nadir in late summer, the lowest waterline of the year.

The orchestra's zenith came in its fiftieth season, the high point of its history.

About six months elapse between the March equinox and the September equinox.

One extant copy of the 1802 broadside remains in the library, and the other known copies were lost.

The defunct railway has carried no trains since the tracks were taken up.

The labile dew on the grass was gone soon after the sun cleared the hill.

The inceptive clause of the charter states the day the society began.

A calm interlude of clear weather came between the two storms.

The motto on the arch calls the city aeonian, as if it would last through age after age.

The stone wall is anterior to the brick house that was later built against it.

In many cities the horse-drawn streetcar was a forerunner of the electric trolley that later replaced it.

After the September equinox, the ensuing weeks bring shorter days to the northern hemisphere because that hemisphere tilts away from the Sun.

The beetle in the net was heretofore unknown in the park log, with no earlier entry.

Henceforth the reading room will close at dusk, a change that starts today and continues.

The bygone ferry appears only in photographs from 1950, and its dock has stood empty since.

The embryonic town map showed the river and a blank square where streets would later be drawn.

Latent buds on the bare twigs stayed closed through winter and opened in spring.

The report called the volcano quiescent because it had produced no eruption and little gas for many years.

The population chart showed a long stasis, the same number of residents year after year.

The mutable shoreline changes shape when strong storms move the sand.

The irreversible fading of those dyes could not be undone after light had broken them down.

The precipitous drop in air temperature came in a single hour as the cold front passed.

The tide's piecemeal rise, a little higher each hour, is marked on the harbor post.

Extra clerks were added to accelerate the applications, moving each form through in fewer days.

The committee voted to defer the decision until its next meeting.

The two diaries are contemporaneous, both kept in the summer of 1888, long before the present day.