- vanish
- vanish, evanesce, evaporate, disappear, fade can all mean to pass from view or out of existence.Vanish implies a complete, often mysterious, and usually sudden passing; it commonly suggests absence of all trace or of any clue that would permit following until found{
no facts on the mother's disappearance. Died in childbirth, ran off with someone, committed suicide: some way of vanishing painful enough to keep Sidney from ever referring to it— Pynchon
}{all those emotions of fear and abhorrence . . . vanished instantly from my mind— Hudson
}{Addison complained that in his time the very appearances of Christianity had vanished— Huxley}
}Evanesce differs from vanish in its greater stress on the process (as effacement or dissipation) by which a thing passes from visibility or thought; sometimes the term distinctly suggests a gradual process{I touch a scarf and it falls into air and light and seems to evanesce— Goyen
}{the sun-streaming clarity of checkered beach parasols, of friendly boys digging castles in the sand, faded in outline, evanesced from the bright precision of reality to vagueness of storm and fog— Joseph Bennett
}Evaporate suggests a vanishing as silently and inconspicuously as water does into vapor{because of future expenses already mandated by the legislature, that surplus will evaporate soon— Armbrister
}The term is often used in respect to tenuous qualities, but it may be employed to describe stealthy or prudent or sudden departures or withdrawings of persons{people whose faith, so tenuous anyway, had evaporated upon the threatening winds of a "cosmic cataclysm"— Styron
}{looking at the high gray-green grass. A man could evaporate in that stuff in a second— R. O. Bowen
}if we try to express almost any poem of his in prose, we find it impossible; its rare spirit evaporates in the process— Day LewisDisappear stresses only the passing from sight or thought; the passing implied may be sudden or gradual, permanent or temporary, but such suggestions are mostly contextual and not in the word{the traditional view, that the world was made up of a vertical scale of creatures, gradually disappeared—S. F. Mason
}{some say, let us go back to Palestine, else Judaism will disappear— Cohen
}{seldom have other writers been able to disappear from their narrative as completely as Faulkner does— Robert Humphrey
}Fade, often with out or away, implies a gradual diminution in clearness and distinctness until the thing becomes invisible{the ship gradually faded from sight
}{all other certainties had faded or eroded away in growing up— Wouk
}{this story seems to have faded out of the popular mind— Norman Douglasy
}Antonyms: appear: loom
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
