vacate
/veɪˈkeɪt/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.14 in modern English
11
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To leave an area, usually as a result of orders from public authorities in the event of a riot or natural disaster.
Example Sentences
- "I have to vacate my house by midday, as the new owner is moving in."
- "You are hereby ordered to vacate the premises within 14 days."
- "The dynamic tests at Wildenrath use continuous test tracks built on the site of a former Royal Air Force station that was vacated after the end of the Cold War."
- "He vacated his coaching position because of the corruption scandal."
- "The judge vacated the earlier decision when new evidence was presented."
- "On Thursday, the New York court of appeals vacated his conviction after concluding that a trial judge permitted jurors to see and hear too much evidence not directly related to the charges he faced. It also erased his 23-year prison sentence and ordered a retrial."
Etymology
Originally used in the legal sense "to annul", a denominal from Early Modern English vacat (“legal annulment”), a development from Middle English vacat (“absence or cancellation noted in a register”), from Latin vacat, third-person singular present active indicative of vacō (“to be idle; to be unoccupied”, literally “to be empty”). The primary modern sense "to move out" likely developed under the influence of older borrowing vacant (“unoccupied”), in combination with the Early Modern use of vacate to refer to the termination of official appointments to office, which would leave those position vacant.