Other forms: vanishes, vanished, vanishing
To vanish is to be gone — not to leave, to be simply not there any more. The keys vanish off the table, the ship vanishes into fog, a man vanishes on the way home from work.
The word is stronger and stranger than disappear, its plain twin: vanish suggests suddenness and something faintly impossible about it, which is why magicians and missing people get it. It has no object — things vanish, you cannot vanish something. And there is the fixed phrase vanish into thin air, which is what English says when it wants to sound helpless.
1verbvanishTo go out of sight suddenly and completely.~28%
“The cat vanished the moment the visitors arrived.”
2verbstopTo stop existing.~72%
“The old dialect had all but vanished by 1950.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 44 sentences found in the wild and placed 29 of them on a sense (15 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: disappear
VAN-ish → a VAN
A white van pulls up, the box goes in, the doors slam shut. You look up and the street is empty.
hooks ontovan
From Latin vanus, empty — the root of vain and vanity. To vanish is to go empty, to become nothing where something was.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁weh₂-
Latin
ēvānēscō
Vulgar Latin
*exvanire — to vanish, disappear, to fade out
Old French
esvanir, esvaniss-
Middle English
evanisshen
English, today
vanish
Built from
Aphetic for obsolete evanish, from Middle English evanisshen, esvanisshen, from Old French esvanir, esvaniss- (modern French évanouir), from Vulgar Latin exvanire (“to vanish, disappear, to fade out”), from Latin ēvānēscō, from vānus (“empty”). by surface analysis, vān- + -ish. a doublet of evanesce. Displaced native cwincan, whose causative persists as quench (“put out (fire)”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA