Evasion

How to spell evasion

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce evasion

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does evasion mean?

1. nounThe act of avoiding, escaping, or dodging something such as a duty, question, or legal obligation.

Evasion in a sentence

• The accountant was charged with tax evasion after hiding offshore income.

• Her vague answer was a clear evasion of the difficult question.

Where does evasion come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin evadere, meaning literally 'to go out' or 'to escape', formed from the prefix e- (a reduced form of ex-, meaning 'out') and vadere, the verb 'to go' or 'to walk'. From the past-participle stem grew the late Latin noun evasio, naming the act of slipping away. English took the word in the fifteenth century by way of Old French evasion, at first for a literal escape and soon for the figurative sense of dodging a question or a duty. The same vadere root, meaning 'to go', still walks quietly inside relatives such as 'invade' (to go into) and 'pervade' (to go through). Knowing that the spelling carries one s in the Latin evasio, then the standard -sion ending, helps explain why it is never spelled with a double s or a -tion.

How the word is built

• e- (variant of ex-: out, away)
• vad (from vadere: to go)
• -sion (noun-forming suffix denoting an action or its result)