Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • intransitive verb To come or occur as something extraneous, additional, or unexpected.
  • intransitive verb To follow immediately after; ensue.
  • intransitive verb Philosophy To be dependent on a set of facts or properties in such a way that change can occur only after change has occurred in those facts or properties.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To come in as extraneous upon something; be added or joined; follow in close conjunction.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • intransitive verb To come as something additional or extraneous; to occur with reference or relation to something else; to happen upon or after something else; to be added; to take place; to happen.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb to follow something closely, either as a consequence or in contrast
  • verb to supersede
  • verb to be dependent on an earlier event
  • verb philosophy to be dependent on something else for existence, truth, or instantiation.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb take place as an additional or unexpected development

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin supervenīre : super-, super- + venīre, to come; see gwā- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin supervenīre, present active infinitive of superveniō ("come over or upon, overtake"), from super ("above") + veniō ("come").

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word supervene.

Examples

  • In view of the important changes in his own life which were about to supervene, that is to say, firstly, his departure for India, and secondly, his coming of age before he could hope to return from that land of promise, he had counted on a quiet evening with his mother.

    From One Generation to Another Henry Seton Merriman 1882

  • The system is said to "supervene" (I'm not making this up) on its components causing the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts.

    Latest Articles 2009

  • The system is said to "supervene" (I'm not making this up) on its components causing the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts.

    Latest Articles Uncommon Descent 2009

  • Blog posts may not be reducible to stuff, but they do supervene on stuff.

    Matthew Yglesias » US Manufacturing and the Trade Deficit 2009

  • And the stuff they supervene on is arranged through physical activity.

    Matthew Yglesias » US Manufacturing and the Trade Deficit 2009

  • Although objects of higher order are based on infima they are not reducible to them; properties of superiora supervene on properties of their inferiora.

    Salvation Santa 2009

  • Nor is it just that appropriate moral predication must supervene on nonmoral predication, to put the point in a way that does not beg the question against non-cognitivism.

    Boys in White Suits 2009

  • On this proposal the norms would be needed to represent the contents of the realist's thought because different realist theories might have the moral properties supervene on different nonmoral properties and a person could be a realist without being committed to the truth of any particular realist theory.

    Boys in White Suits 2009

  • Sounds thus are not identical with and do not supervene upon the waves, since waves travel (Pasnau 1999).

    Auditory Perception O'Callaghan, Casey 2009

  • In general, at least in some exemplary cases, high-level structures supervene on low-level material flux.

    Doctor, My Eyes 2009

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • Philosophy To be dependent on a set of facts or properties in such a way that change can occur only after change has occurred in those facts or properties.

    July 29, 2009