liminal
If you're in between two places or experiences, especially if you're transitioning between them, you're in a liminal place. Teenagers are in that liminal stage between childhood and adulthood — not always an easy place to be!
A liminal space is a kind of threshold or doorway to a new experience, and the word's root reflects that idea. The Latin root, limen, means "sill, cross-piece, or threshold." This can be a meaningful transition, like the liminal moments between life and death. It can also be the beginning of perception, that first moment you can sense something; when something is instead subliminal, it's too far below that threshold for you to sense it.
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having the nature of a transitional space, phase, or experience
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(psychology) relating to the threshold beyond which sensation cannot be perceived
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Vocabulary lists containing liminal
In this second book of the series, high school seniors Aristotle Mendoza and Dante Quintana struggle to find places and ways for them to safely figure out what love means to them.
In this novel, a transgender Jewish teenager who is navigating his parents' rejection of his gender meets a golem who asks him to help save the world.
This novel follows four generations of fathers and sons from the Filipino American Maghabol family as they struggle to survive and understand each other.