Word of the Day: incipient

The word incipient has appeared in 30 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Feb. 8 in “An Artist With Roots in Nairobi and New York Imagines a New Destiny” by Aruna D’Souza:

The Nigerian American writer, photographer and art historian Teju Cole met Mutu more than a decade ago at a party that had migrated from the Afropunk festival to Mutu’s house in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn; the crowd, like the festival itself, he recalled, was “African American, African, futuristic, cosmopolitan, politically alert.” While underlining the creative leap that Mutu’s move to sculpture represents, he also noted the continuities between the New York and Kenyan phases of her career, after she began traveling with her husband, Mario Lazzaroni, a manager for Estée Lauder in Africa, and their two young daughters.

“I think the move really expanded her language — a kind of disciplined maximalism — into the earth, and into the natural materials, into clay, into wood,” Cole said. “And it contains all the stuff that had been incipient in her work: disregard of boundaries between human and animal, mythical and documentary, organic and cyborg.”

Daily Word Challenge

Can you correctly use the word incipient in a sentence?

Based on the definition and example provided, write a sentence using today’s Word of the Day and share it as a comment on this article. It is most important that your sentence makes sense and demonstrates that you understand the word’s definition, but we also encourage you to be creative and have fun.

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If you want a better idea of how incipient can be used in a sentence, read these usage examples on Vocabulary.com.

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