Other forms: evolved, evolving, evolves
To evolve is to change slowly, step by step, into something more developed. Wolves evolved into dogs over thousands of years; a garage band evolves into a stadium act; a rough sketch evolves into a finished design.
Biology owns the loudest use — species evolve, and the noun evolution and adjective evolutionary belong to that account of how. Everyday English borrows the word for anything gradual: a language, a job, a friendship, a plan. It takes FROM and INTO — birds evolved from dinosaurs, the shop evolved into a chain of forty. The heart of it is slow and unplanned, so you cannot evolve a strategy over lunch, though the formal transitive use exists in business writing: the company evolved a new pricing model. Something that changed overnight has not evolved; it has been changed.
1verbevolveTo develop gradually into something more advanced or more complex.
“The website has evolved into something its founders never imagined.”
2verbchangeTo change over many generations through natural selection.
“Whales evolved from animals that once walked on land.”
3verbworkTo work something out gradually over a long period.
“Over twenty years she evolved a teaching method entirely her own.”
Evolve is the Latin ēvolvō, 'to unroll, to unfold' — ē-, 'out of', plus volvō, 'to roll'. A Roman book was a roll of papyrus, and reading it meant unrolling it a column at a time, which is exactly how the word still feels: the thing was in there all along, coming out gradually.
Latin
ēvolvō — unroll, unfold
English, today
evolve
Built from
Borrowed from Latin ēvolvō (“unroll, unfold”), from ē- (“out of”) (short form of ex) + volvō (“roll”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA