modern

Etymology

From Middle French moderne, from Late Latin modernus; from Latin modo (“just now”), originally ablative of modus (“measure”); hence, by measure, "just now". See also mode.

adj

1. Pertaining to a current or recent time and style; not ancient.
   Our online interactive game is a modern approach to teaching about gum disease.  Although it was built in the 1600s, the building still has a very modern look.
   The "Overhead Door" is the garage door that can be opened or closed at a touch every day in the year—regardless of the weather. It is the garage door that opens UP Completely Out of the Way. In short, it is the modern door for the modern garage—in step with the times. May 31, 1930, “The "Overhead Door" for Garage-Factory-Warehouse”, in The Saturday Evening Post, volume 202, number 48, page 110
   In fact, he had created the conditions for the great horror of modern times. June 14 2018, Timothy Snyder, “How Did the Nazis Gain Power in Germany?”, in The New York Times
   The solitary, lumbering trolls of Scandinavian mythology would sometimes be turned to stone by exposure to sunlight. Barack Obama is hoping that several measures announced on June 4th will have a similarly paralysing effect on their modern incarnation, the patent troll. 2013-06-08, “Obama goes troll-hunting”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8839, page 55
2. (history) Pertaining to the modern period (c.1800 to contemporary times), particularly in academic historiography.

noun

1. Someone who lives in modern times.
   What the moderns could mean by their suppression of the final couplet's repeatings, cannot be conceiv'd […] 1779, Edward Capell, John Collins, Notes and various readings to Shakespeare
   They at least had the immense and mighty imagination of which I speak; they could unthink the past. They could uncreate the Fall. With a reverence which moderns might think impudence, they could uncreate the Creation. 1930, G. K. Chesterton, The Resurrection of Rome
   Even though we moderns can never crawl inside the skin of the ancient and think and feel as he did […] we must as historians make the attempt. 1956, John Albert Wilson, The Culture of Ancient Egypt, page 144
   Yeats understood these ancient mysteries better than any modern. 1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 181