Invisible means impossible to see. Invisible to the naked eye, an invisible line, he felt invisible.
It covers things too small, too transparent or simply hidden — invisible ink, invisible mending, invisible from the road. The figurative sense about people is common and pointed: feeling invisible means being present and unnoticed, and invisible work means labour nobody counts. In economics, invisible earnings are from services rather than goods. Note the invisible hand, Adam Smith's phrase for the way markets are supposed to organise themselves.
1adjectiveinvisibleImpossible to see.
“The join is invisible unless you know where to look.”
synonyms: unseen, imperceptible
2adjectivepresentPresent but unnoticed.
“She was invisible in that office for eleven years.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
invisible is a state of not being seen.
Latin invisibilis is in-, not, plus visibilis, from videre, to see. It came into English in the fourteenth century in religious writing, describing God, and only later escaped into ordinary use.
Latin
invīsibilis
Old French
invisible
Middle English
invisible
English, today
invisible
From Middle English invisible, from Old French invisible, from Latin invīsibilis. Displaced native unġesewenlīċ. Morphologically in + visible. unvisible.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA