Other forms: empties, emptied, emptying
Empty means with nothing inside. An empty box, an empty room, the tank is empty. It is one of the plainest adjectives in the language and it needs almost no explaining.
It is also a verb — empty the bin, the hall emptied in a minute — and a noun in the plural: put the empties out, meaning bottles. Figuratively, empty means without meaning or feeling: an empty promise, empty words, an empty gesture. And empty-handed means arriving or leaving with nothing, which is the standard way to describe a fruitless errand. Note the comparative emptier and the noun emptiness.
1adjectiveemptyWith nothing inside or on it.
“The fridge was completely empty.”
2verbremoveTo remove everything from something.
“Empty your pockets before you put them in the wash.”
3adjectivesincerityWithout meaning or sincerity.
“It was an empty promise and everybody knew it.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
empty is a state of containing nothing.
Old English aemtig meant unoccupied or at leisure, from aemta, leisure — so empty first described a person with nothing to do rather than a container with nothing in it. The p was added later by English speakers who found the m-t hard to say cleanly, exactly as in Thompson.
Proto-Indo-European
*med- — measure; to acquire, possess, be in command
Proto-Germanic
*mōtijô
Old English
ǣmtiġ
Middle English
emty
English, today
empty
Built from
From Middle English emty, amty, from Old English ǣmtiġ, ǣmettiġ (“vacant, empty, free, idle, unmarried”) literally “without must or obligation, leisurely”, from Proto-Germanic - uz- (“out”) + Proto-Germanic mōtijô, mōtô (“must, obligation, need”), mōtiþô (“ability, accommodation”), from Proto-Indo-European med- (“measure; to acquire, possess, be in command”). Related to ġeǣmtigian (“to empty”), ǣmetta (“leisure”), mōtan (“can, to be allowed”). More at mote, meet. The interconsonantal excrescent p is a euphonic insertion dating from Middle English.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA