volatile

A chemical or compound that changes into a gas easily.

Adjective

  1. Evaporating or vaporizing readily under normal conditions.
  2. Of a substance, explosive.
  3. Of a price, variable or erratic.
    • Its pricing is highly volatile — and therefore highly risky. For all its nosebleed ascents, bitcoin also has had some gut-punching plunges. Between November 2021 and November 2022, for example, the price of bitcoin...
  4. Of a person, quick to become angry or violent.
    • a volatile man

    Synonyms: furious rabid raging ferocious fierce grim incessive infuriate savage volatile wild

  5. Fickle.
    • Now Mr. Bush plans to pour more arms into this unstable region and add fuel to the volatile powderkeg he has foolishly created. - 2007 August 1, “Unwise Arms Deal With Saudi Arabia (2 Letters)”, in The New York Times,...

    Synonyms: changeable erratic unpredictable

  6. Temporary or ephemeral.

    Synonyms: fleeting passing transitory earthly ephemeral brief deciduous evanescent flying fugacious fugitive instant momentary perishable quick seasonable short short-lived temporary transient transitive volatile whilend worldly

  7. Of a situation potentially violent.
  8. Of a variable etc., having its associated memory immediately updated with any changes in value.
    • This method stores a value into a non-volatile field called result, then stores true in the volatile field finished. The main thread waits for the field finished to be set to true, then reads the field result. - 2010,...
  9. Of memory, whose content is lost when the computer is powered down.
  10. Passing through the air on wings, or by the buoyant force of the atmosphere; flying; having the power to fly.

Origin

From Middle French volatile, from Latin volātilis (“flying; swift; temporary; volatile”), from volō (“to fly”).

Forms

more volatile most volatile

Derived

caustic volatile alkali nonvolatile sal volatile unvolatile volatilely volatile memory volatile organic compound volatility

Noun

  1. A chemical or compound that changes into a gas easily.
  2. A variable that is volatile, i.e. has its associated memory immediately updated with any change in value.
    • Operations on C++ volatiles do put the compiler on notice that the object may be modified asynchronously, and hence are generally safer to use than ordinary variable accesses. - 2011, Victor Pankratius, Ali-Reza...

Forms

volatiles