thin air
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5.3
- noun
- /θɪn ɛr/
- Informal
:
sin dejar rastro
- It's just disappeared into thin air.
- vanish into thin air
- disappear into thin air
And from that time and from that time he vanished in thin air.
- And from that time and from that time he vanished in thin air.
- Each budding relationship evaporates in thin air.
- I will have been talking to pure thin air, you know, Oh no, no stories.
- We were just playing with that ball and now thin air poof, gone forever.
Examples
-
Can it be you've really come and gone, evaporated like a dream into thin air?
Fiction book (1997) -
After the storm, the lost ship seemed to have vanished into thin air, with no trace left behind.
-
Suddenly, as if out of thin air, the Cable Guy is standing right behind him.
Fiction book (1996) -
Well, the client disappeared into thin air, and I have since not been able to get in touch with the client.
-
I saw this body disappear into thin air.
-
Two people have disappeared into thin air.
-
He's disappeared into thin air without leaving a trace for us to follow.
Fiction book (1990) -
"I saw him vanish into thin air with my own eyes, nothing left but the cloak."
Fiction book (2000) -
The magician made the rabbit disappear into thin air during the final act, leaving the audience in awe.
-
The documents I needed had seemingly disappeared into thin air, making it impossible to complete the project.
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
The sense 'disappear completely' is metaphorically built from 'thin' (not dense, insubstantial) + 'air' (something intangible), so a learner who knows both words can plausibly infer that something has become undetectable. However, the phrase is a conventional collocation (especially in the set expression 'vanish into thin air') and its idiomatic use and fixed syntax mean the meaning is not fully predictable from the parts alone.
Etymology
Thin air comes from the picture of very thin and empty air — a space with almost nothing in it. So if something appears from thin air, it seems to have come from 'nowhere'.