Vacate

How to spell vacate

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce vacate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does vacate mean?

1. verbTo leave a place that one has been occupying, so that it stands empty.
2. verbTo annul or set aside a court order, judgment, or decision.

Vacate in a sentence

• Guests must vacate the room before eleven on the day of checkout.

• The appeal court agreed to vacate the earlier conviction.

• The company gave staff three months to vacate the old building.

• The lawyers filed a motion to vacate the default ruling.

Where does vacate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This verb traces back to the Latin vacare, which literally meant 'to be empty' or 'to be unoccupied', the same root that gives us 'vacant' and 'vacuum'. Latin built the participle vacatus from it, and English adopted vacate in the seventeenth century with the plain sense of leaving a space empty by departing from it. Alongside that physical meaning, lawyers developed a second use: to make a court judgment 'empty' of force, that is, to annul or set it aside. The shared idea running through every use is emptiness, since to vacate something is to leave nothing behind. Knowing that the core is vac, 'empty', is a tidy way to fix the single c and the spelling: it is the same vac that sits inside vacant, vacuum, and vacation.

How the word is built

• vac- (from Latin vacare: to be empty)
• -ate (verb-forming suffix)