evacuate
Formsevacuates, evacuating, evacuated
- 1
- 2To leave or withdraw from a place; to quit or depart from it.
The troops evacuated the city as enemy forces advanced.
Residents were told to evacuate their homes immediately.
Similarleave, vacate, abandon, quit, desert
Note
Here the object is the place itself. Soldiers evacuate a fortress, and in Edmund Burke's The Abridgement of the History of England (1757) the Norwegians are forced to evacuate the country. Keep it apart from the sense that moves people out, where the object is the people: firefighters evacuate the inhabitants from a street. Ask what is being emptied. If it is the area, this is the sense.
- 3To empty something out completely, including removing all the air or gas to create a vacuum.
Technicians evacuate the chamber until almost no gas remains.
The system evacuates air from the sealed container to preserve the sample.
Oppositefill
Note
This is the literal emptying, the one that sits closest to the Latin: ēvacuō meant "to empty out," and English borrowed it in 1526. In the laboratory it means drawing air or gas out of a sealed space until the pressure falls far below atmospheric and approaches a vacuum. The container is the object, such as a chamber or a vessel. Evacuating is often a first step before refilling it with a chosen gas such as nitrogen.
- 4To remove, eject, or discharge contents, as from a vessel or from the bladder or bowels.
The drug stimulates the bowel to evacuate its contents.
After surgery, the patient struggled to evacuate the bladder fully.
Similarempty, void, expel, discharge, eliminate
Note
The body's own emptying belongs to physiology and clinical practice. Its object can be either the vessel or what it holds. A patient evacuates the bladder, while John Barclay in 1822 describes the living body as able to evacuate what is redundant or useless. Void and discharge are its closest partners in this register, and both share the same freedom of object.
- 5To render something empty, or to strip it of the contents, qualities, or meaning it once held.
Like a word said so many times it loses all its meaning.
Endless repetition can evacuate even the most powerful word of its meaning.
The scandal evacuated the office of whatever trust remained between colleagues.
Note
A figurative emptying that takes a double object joined by of. James Marsh's Preliminary Essay to Aids to Reflection (1825) speaks of evacuating the Scriptures of their most important doctrines. The thing stripped comes first, and what it loses follows of, just as with deprive. Used this way, the word suggests a hollowing-out: the outer form remains while its substance is taken away.
- 6To make something void, such as a contract or a marriage, so that it no longer has any force.
The appeals court voted to evacuate the lower court's judgment.
The new statute evacuated the older contract entirely.
Similarannul, void, nullify, invalidate, vacate
Note
A legal undoing rather than a physical emptying: what is evacuated is a binding arrangement, such as a contract or a marriage, and vacate is its near twin. Francis Bacon, writing in 1622, uses it of a marriage that would not be evacuated after cohabitation and actual consummation. The object is always the bond itself, never the people bound by it.
Practice
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Origin
First attested in 1526, borrowed from Latin ēvacuātus, the perfect passive participle of ēvacuō ("to empty out, evacuate"), formed with the verb-making suffix -ate.