vanished

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of vanish.

   The old footpaths vanished beneath decades of overgrowth.

   Within seconds the magician's assistant had vanished from the locked box.

   Note

   Because vanish is usually intransitive, the participle normally pairs with have rather than be: the footpaths had vanished. A passive is possible only with the transitive meaning, to make someone disappear, as in the witnesses were vanished. Mathematicians use the same form when a quantity becomes zero: the term has vanished at the boundary.

2. 2
   adjective

   No longer apparent or in existence; gone without remaining trace.

   Historians pieced together the customs of a vanished people from scattered artifacts.

   The survey marked several vanished villages that once held thousands of residents.

   Similarlost, extinct, gone, disappeared, bygone

   Oppositeextant, existing

   Note

   The participle turned adjective, and it usually sits before its noun: a vanished world, a vanished people, vanished villages. Élisée Reclus uses it in 1890 for the lost land naturalists named Lemuria, and that is its natural ground: things that once existed and left only fragments behind. Unlike invisible, it always implies a past presence. The verb behind it appears in the past forms of vanish.

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