Other forms: vacated, vacating, vacates
To vacate is to leave a place empty. Vacate the premises, vacate the room by ten, vacate the seat.
It is formal and belongs to notices and tenancy agreements — vacate the property, please vacate the building. It also means to give up a post: vacate the chair, a vacated seat. In law, to vacate a judgment is to annul it, which is actually the older sense: the word came from a Latin note in a register meaning it is cancelled. Note vacancy, vacant.
1verbvacateTo leave a place empty.
“Guests must vacate their rooms by eleven o'clock on the day they leave.”
2verbannulTo annul a judgment, in law.
“The appeals court vacated the lower court's ruling and ordered a new trial.”
vacate is a leaving empty.
Latin vacat means it is empty or it is cancelled, and Middle English used vacat as a note in a register marking an entry void. The verb came from that note.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁weh₂-
Latin
vacat
Middle English
vacat — absence or cancellation noted in a register
English, today
vacate
Built from
Originally used in the legal sense "to annul", a denominal from vacat (“legal annulment”), a development from Middle English vacat (“absence or cancellation noted in a register”), from Latin vacat, third-person singular present active indicative of vacō (“to be idle; to be unoccupied”) literally “to be empty”. The primary modern sense "to move out" likely developed under the influence of older borrowing vacant (“unoccupied”), in combination with the Early Modern use of vacate to refer to the termination of official appointments to office, which would leave those position vacant.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA