Other forms: ventilated, ventilating
To ventilate is to let air move through a space. Ventilate the room, poorly ventilated, ventilate the roof space.
Moving air out and fresh air in is what removes moisture, smells and airborne infection, and the pandemic made ventilation a public subject for the first time in a century. Sealing buildings for warmth without ventilating them causes damp. In medicine, to ventilate a patient is to breathe for them. Note that the Latin means to fan.
1verbventilateTo let air move through a space.
“Open the windows to ventilate the room while you paint.”
2verbbreatheTo breathe for a patient by machine.
“The patient could not breathe on his own, so doctors had to ventilate him.”
ventilate is an airing.
Latin ventilare means to fan or winnow, from ventus, wind. Vent, wind and window come from related airs.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂weh₁-
Latin
ventilātus
English, today
ventilate
From Middle English -, borrowed from Latin ventilātus, past participle of ventilō.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA