Other forms: evacuated, evacuating, evacuates
To evacuate is to move everybody out of a dangerous place. Evacuate the building, they were evacuated, evacuate the area.
The people are evacuated and so is the place — both are correct, though the building was evacuated is far commoner than the residents were evacuated in official writing. Evacuation is the noun. In British history, the Evacuation refers to the movement of children out of cities in 1939, and an evacuee is one of them. Note that in medicine evacuate has a bodily sense, which is why the word is avoided in some contexts.
1verbevacuateTo move everybody out of a dangerous place.
“They evacuated the whole street in about twenty minutes.”
evacuate is a moving out.
Latin evacuare is ex-, out, plus vacuus, empty — the same root as vacuum and vacant. To evacuate a building is literally to empty it out.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁weh₂-
Latin
ēvacuātus
English, today
evacuate
Built from
1526; Latin ēvacuātus, the perfect passive participle of ēvacuō (“to empty out, evacuate”), see -ate.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA