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OneKitly

obvious

adjectivecommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈɒ.vɪəs//
  • United Kingdom//ˈɒb.vɪəs//
  • United Kingdom//ˈɒv.jəs//
  • United States//ˈɑb.vi.əs//
  • United States//ˈɑ.vi.əs//

Easily discovered, seen, or understood; self-explanatory.

adjective

  1. 1

    Easily discovered, seen, or understood; self-explanatory.

    Carried somehow, somewhither, for some reason, on these surging floods, were these travelers, of errand not wholly obvious to their fellows, yet of such sort as to call into query alike the nature of their errand and their own relations. It is easily earned repetition to state that Josephine St. Auban's was a presence not to be concealed.

    One of the most obvious results of the B.R. Modernisation Plan has been the increasing use of diesel and electric traction; a less obvious by-product is the increase in track damage possible with the new forms of traction.

    'Cause I threw you the obvious / to see what occurs behind / the eyes of a fallen angel / Eyes of a tragedy / Oh well, oh well / Apparently nothing / Apparently nothing at all

    It is not obvious, to economists anyway, that cities should exist at all. Crowds of people mean congestion and costly land and labour. But there are also well-known advantages to bunching up. When transport costs are sufficiently high a firm can spend more money shipping goods to clusters of consumers than it saves on cheap land and labour.

Etymology

16th century, from Latin obvius (“being in the way so as to meet, meeting, easy to access, at hand, ready, obvious”) + -ous, from ob- (“before”) + via (“way”).

Forms

comparative
more obvious
superlative
most obvious
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).