Evacuate

How to spell evacuate

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce evacuate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does evacuate mean?

1. verbTo move people away from a dangerous place, or to leave such a place, for safety.

Evacuate in a sentence

• Firefighters told residents to evacuate the building immediately.

• The council prepared a plan to evacuate low-lying homes before the flood.

Where does evacuate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin evacuare, which meant 'to empty out' or 'to make empty'. It was built from the prefix ex-, meaning 'out', and vacuus, meaning 'empty' or 'void', the same root that gives us 'vacuum' and 'vacant'. In its earliest English use during the 1500s it carried a strongly medical sense, describing the emptying of the body or of bodily fluids, and physicians spoke of evacuating the bowels or the blood. Over time the sense broadened from emptying a body to emptying a place, so that by the modern era it chiefly meant removing people from a building or area of danger. The buried idea of 'making empty' is a handy spelling cue: the heart of the word is vacu, exactly as in vacuum, so there is one c and the vowels run vac-u, not vac-cu.

How the word is built

• e- (out, from ex-)
• vacu (empty, from Latin vacuus)
• -ate (verb suffix)