Other forms: disappeared, disappears, disappearing
To disappear is to stop being visible. The coin in the magician's hand, the sun going behind a cloud, a friend who walks round the corner and is gone.
It covers things that stop existing as well as things that go out of sight: species disappear, villages disappear under a new reservoir, the headache disappeared after an hour. People use it about themselves half-jokingly — I disappeared for two days — meaning nobody could find them. The noun is disappearance, and it is the word the police use: they are investigating her disappearance. In some countries people are disappeared, taken by the state and never seen again, a passive form with something terrible inside it. And it takes no object: you disappear, but you do not disappear something — you make it disappear.
1verbdisappearTo go out of sight; to stop being visible.~29%
“The path disappeared into the trees and we turned back.”
synonyms: vanish
2verbexistingTo stop existing.~43%
“Small shops have disappeared from the high street one by one.”
3verbsuddenlyTo go away suddenly so that nobody knows where you are.~28%
“He disappeared for a week and came back with no explanation.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 15 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: vanish
Disappear is dis- fastened onto appear, put together in Middle English as disapeeren. It shoved aside two native words, fordwīnan and cwincan; the second survives in the causative quench, which is what you do to a fire. English still puts out flames with a word for vanishing.
Middle English
disapeeren
English, today
disappear
Built from
From Middle English disapeeren, equivalent to dis + appear. Displaced native fordwīnan. Displaced native cwincan, whose causative persists as quench (“put out (fire)”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA