Definition of "modern" []

• Of or relating to recent times or the present: modern history. (adjective)
• Characteristic or expressive of recent times or the present; contemporary or up-to-date: a modern lifestyle; a modern way of thinking. (adjective)
• Of or relating to a recently developed or advanced style, technique, or technology: modern art; modern medicine. (adjective)
• Avant-garde; experimental. (adjective)
• Linguistics Of, relating to, or being a living language or group of languages: Modern Italian; Modern Romance languages. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Edouard Drumont's book Jewish France signaled the rise of modern anti-Semitism, attacking Jews for capitalism, radicalism, and other “modern problems."
• "This middle zone of power and mastery is the path of the modern transcendentalist, and the one who walks it and lives in unification with its laws is the _modern transcendentalist_ of the new civilization."
• "Owing to the very fact that nothing is more modern than this thorough morbidness, this dilatoriness and excessive irritability of the nervous machinery, Wagner is the _modern artist par excellence_, the Cagliostro of modernity."