Evaporation is liquid turning into gas and leaving. A puddle gone by mid-afternoon, wet washing drying on a line, the water level dropping in a glass left on the windowsill all week.
It happens at the surface, molecule by molecule, and it needs no boiling — a shirt dries at fifteen degrees. That is the distinction a science teacher will test you on: boiling happens right through a liquid at one fixed temperature, evaporation happens at the top, at any temperature, faster when the air is warm, dry or moving. Sea water evaporates, leaves its salt behind and comes back as rain, which is the water cycle in a sentence. The verb is evaporate, and evaporated milk is milk with most of its water driven off. The word also does duty for things you cannot see: support evaporates, a lead evaporates, goodwill evaporates over one bad meeting.
1nounevaporationThe change of a liquid into a gas at its surface, without boiling.
“Evaporation from the reservoir doubles in a hot summer.”
2nounvanishingThe quick disappearance of something that was there a moment before.
“The evaporation of public trust took a single week.”
evaporation is a change of state.
Evaporation reached English through French évaporation, and before that Latin evaporatio. Inside English it still comes apart cleanly: evaporate plus -ion, the ending that turns an action into a thing you can name. The same ending is doing the same job in combustion, reaction and expansion — half the vocabulary of a science lesson is built this way.
Latin
evaporatio
French
évaporation
English, today
evaporation
From French évaporation, from Latin evaporatio. Morphologically evaporate + ion.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA