incipient.

At an initial stage before becoming fully established.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• incipient crisis
• incipient change

On the page

The report detected an incipient crisis in recruitment.

Usage notes

Primary category: academic / formal. Forms: Normally non-gradable; no ordinary comparative or superlative. Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1 only. Use numbered sense fields for all meanings. Established modern English lexical item. No separate regional spelling or grammatical inflection entry. Writing functions: analysis, qualification. Commonness: moderately common.