disappeared

Pluraldisappeareds

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of disappear.

   The hikers disappeared into the thick morning fog.

   By noon the puddles had disappeared from the road.

   Note

   One spelling serves both the simple past and the perfect: the hikers disappeared, the puddles had disappeared. In its everyday senses the verb takes no object, so a passive like "was disappeared" ought to be impossible. That strangeness is deliberate when it appears. It signals the transitive, political use, in which someone makes a person vanish, the same idea that the euphemistic adjective carries.

   The activist was disappeared by security forces in 1977.

   By the 1860s the old shawl had almost disappeared from the town.

2. 2
   adjectivecolloquialeuphemistic

   Made to vanish by someone, often a government acting for political reasons.

   The government denied any knowledge of the disappeared dissidents.

   Decades later, the remains of several disappeared villagers were finally identified.

   Similarmissing, vanished, abducted

   Note

   A euphemism that works through grammar. It presents a person as having simply vanished, when the point is that someone made them vanish. Applied to dissidents or villagers, it carries the weight of abduction and often death, so it reads as pointed rather than vague. It does not take degrees: no one is more disappeared than another. Make the agency clear from context, or readers may hear only an ordinary absence.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A person who has been forcibly abducted by a state and whose fate remains unknown; a desaparecido.

   Relatives of the disappeared marched through the capital demanding answers.

   The commission documented the name of every known disappeared from that decade.

   Note

   English's counterpart to Spanish desaparecido, and most at home as a collective. The disappeared names a group and takes a plural verb, like the missing or the dead. The noun can also be counted (one disappeared, several disappeareds), but the collective is the usual choice. It names the victims that the euphemistic adjective describes.

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