Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

emigrate

UK/ˈɛmɪɡɹeɪt/US/ˈɛmɪɡɹeɪt/
verbB2+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,132 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: emigrated, emigrating, emigrates

To emigrate is to leave your own country to settle in another. Emigrate to Canada, decided to emigrate, emigrated in 1952.

The pair is the difficulty: you emigrate from where you are leaving and immigrate to where you arrive, and the same journey is both. Migrate covers either direction and needs no country named.

Definitions of emigrate

  1. 1verbemigrateTo leave your own country to settle in another.B2+

    “Her grandparents emigrated from Italy to Argentina in the 1950s.”

emigrate is a leaving.

Where it comes from

Latin emigrare means to move away, from ex-, out, plus migrare, to move.

  1. Latin

    emigratus

  2. English, today

    emigrate

Built from

  • emigro · Latin — to move away, remove, depart from a place
  • ex- · Latin — out of, from
  • migro · Latin — to move, remove, depart

From Latin emigratus, perfect passive participle of emigro (“to move away, remove, depart from a place”), from ex- (“out of, from”) + migro (“to move, remove, depart”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

emigrate in the wild

  • The ban on Jews emigrating to Israel was lifted in 1971, leading to the 1970s Soviet Union aliyah.

    Refusenik

  • Kukk protested the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR in 1979, and applied for permission to emigrate to the West.

    Jüri Kukk

  • As she was Jewish she was likely forced to emigrate with the Nazi Party's coming to power in 1933, although her exact fate is unknown.

    Fanny Carlsen

  • The group supported the 1933 Haavara Agreement between Nazi Germany and German Zionist Jews which was designed to encourage German Jews to emigrate to Palestine.

    Zionist Federation of Germany

  • Spanish New Zealanders refers to New Zealand citizens and residents of Spanish descent, or people who were born in Spain and emigrated to New Zealand.

    Spanish New Zealanders

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the migro family

migrationmigrateemigrate

emigrate — used about once every 12,385 pages · #12,132 · point at the bar for the others