- 1短暫的、稍縱即逝的（帶有可惜、留不住的感覺）
Lasting only a very short time, and gone before you can hold on to it. The word does not just mean 'short' — it carries a feeling of loss, that the thing passed too quickly. So it goes naturally with things you would have wanted to keep: a fleeting moment, a fleeting glimpse, a fleeting smile, fleeting happiness, a fleeting thought that you cannot get back. A short meeting is just short; a fleeting meeting suggests you wished it were longer. It comes before the noun almost always — you say 'a fleeting visit', and you would not normally say 'the visit was fleeting' in speech, though writers do. It is somewhat literary and slightly formal; in everyday talk people say 'quick', 'brief' or 'just for a second'. The adverb is 'fleetingly'.
From the word’s history
From fleet + -ing; from Middle English fleten, from Old English flēotan 'to float'.
fleet 加 -ing；fleet 源自古英文 flēotan「漂浮」。
組成fleet (an old verb meaning 'to float, to drift past') + -ing. The old picture is of something floating by on water while you stand on the bank watching it go — which is exactly the feeling the word still has.
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
fleetingadj/ˈfliːtɪŋ/
- 1
Passing quickly; of short duration.
- Architecture, sculpture, painting are static arts. Even in literature "our flying minds," as George Meredith says, cannot contain protracted description. It is so; for from sequences of words they must assemble all the details in one simultaneous impression. But moments of fleeting beauty too transient to be caught by any means less swift than light itself are registered on the screen.
- As they passed, accelerating, on to the bridge and felt the first bite of the incline beyond, one had a fleeting glimpse of driver and fireman, illumined as by the fires of hell, the one tugging at the regulator handle, the other shovelling for dear life.
- 2
That which flees, especially quickly; fugitive.
fleetingnoun/ˈfliːtɪŋ/
- 1
rail-transportrailwaystransportAn automatic operation mode of an absolute signal that reserves a route for several trains following one another, without the need for dispatcher to re-set the route for each train.
這個拼法也被記錄為下列字的變化形：
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。