Aphetic for obsolete evanish, from Middle English, borrowed from Old French esvanir, esvaniss- (modern French évanouir), from Vulgar Latin *exvanire (“to vanish, disappear, to fade out”), from Latin evanescere, from vanus (“empty”).
- To become invisible or to move out of view unnoticed.
- 1843 December 19, Charles Dickens, “Stave Three. The Second of the Three Spirits.”, in A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, London: Chapman & Hall, […], OCLC 55746801, pages 79–80:
- Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit, and punch, all vanished instantly.
- 1920, Mary Roberts Rinehart; Avery Hopwood, chapter I, in The Bat: A Novel from the Play (Dell Book; 241), New York, N.Y.: Dell Publishing Company, OCLC 20230794, page 01:
- 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.
- (mathematics) To become equal to zero.
- The function vanishes at .
vanish (plural vanishes)
- (phonetics) 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.
- (Can we find and add a quotation of Rush to this entry?)
- A magic trick in which something seems to disappear.
- The French drop is a well-known vanish involving sleight of hand.
Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for vanish in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.)