Meaning
To disappear completely and mysteriously, leaving no trace, sign, or explanation behind. Applied to people, objects, money, files, and hopes alike, it typically carries a note of bafflement at how something apparently solid could simply cease to exist. Neutral, everyday register and a workhorse of journalism and informal narration. Neutral everyday register, especially common in reporting unexplained disappearances of things as well as people. Regional use: General English (Shakespearean origin).
Origin
Shakespeare never wrote the exact phrase. In Othello (c. 1604), Act 3 Scene 1, the Clown dismisses Cassio's musicians with 'Go; vanish into air; away!', and in The Tempest (c. 1611), Act 4 Scene 1, Prospero says the masque's spirits 'are melted into air, into thin air'. The Phrase Finder traces the first known joining of the two elements to The Edinburgh Advertiser of April 1822, which has visions 'vanish into thin air', after which the fused idiom spread steadily in print, alongside independent use of 'thin air' by writers from Milton onward. Its career is thus one of posthumous assembly from two separate Shakespearean formulas rather than coinage by him.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- disappear into thin air
- disappeared into thin air
- into thin air
- vanished into thin air
Usage Examples
- Half of my scholarship money seems to have vanished into thin air after the first month of term.
- The magician's assistant vanished into thin air, leaving only a swirl of stage smoke.
- Uploads keep vanishing into thin air - the folder claims six files, but only two will open.