Skip to content
OneKitly

vanish

verbnouncommon in dialogue

  • //ˈvænɪʃ//

To become invisible or to move out of view unnoticed.

verb

  1. 1

    To become invisible or to move out of view unnoticed.

    Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit, and punch, all vanished instantly.

    The Bat—they called him the Bat. Like a bat he chose the night hours for his work of rapine; like a bat he struck and vanished, pouncingly, noiselessly; like a bat he never showed himself to the face of the day.

    I realize sometimes / In a web of passion we all get caught / But understand / All the hurt and all the pain / It's gonna vanish just like the rain

  2. 2

    To become equal to zero.

    The function f such as f(x)#61;x² vanishes at x#61;0.

  3. 3

    To disappear; to kidnap.

    And as if to prove it, one of his friends was vanished and was never seen again. The guy got in a taxi one night, and no one ever saw him ever again.

    It was whispered that men had been “vanished” by the Line and returned everted. Turned inside out.

Etymology

Aphetic for obsolete evanish, from Middle English evanisshen, esvanisshen, from Old French esvanir, esvaniss- (modern French évanouir), from Vulgar Latin *exvanire (“to vanish, disappear, to fade out”), from Latin ēvānēscō, ēvānēscere, from vānus (“empty”). By surface analysis, Latin vān- + -ish (“verb suffix”). Doublet of evanesce. Displaced native Old English cwincan, whose causative persists as quench (“put out (fire)”).

noun

  1. 1

    The brief terminal part of a vowel or vocal element, differing more or less in quality from the main part.

    a as in ale ordinarily ends with a vanish of i as in ill.

    o as in old ordinarily ends with a vanish of oo as in foot.

    The median stres may also on a protracted quantity , slightly resemble respectively that of the radical and of the vanish , by sudenly enlarging in the course of the prolongation and gradualy diminishing ; and by the reverse

  2. 2

    A magic trick in which something seems to disappear.

    The French drop is a well-known vanish involving sleight of hand.

  3. 3

    A disappearance; a vanishment.

Forms

plural
vanishes
past tense
vanished
past participle
vanished
present participle
vanishing
third person singular
vanishes
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).