INTO THIN AIR Definition & Meaning

into thin air

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Idioms and Phrases

Also, into the blue . Completely disappeared, as in The report was here on my desk and now it's gone, vanished into thin air , or I don't know where they've gone—into the blue, for all I know . Both of these hyperbolic expressions, often preceded by vanish as in the first example, use the rarefied atmosphere far above the earth as a metaphor for an unknown location. Shakespeare wrote of ghosts that “melted . . . into thin air” ( The Tempest , 4:1). An antonym for both is out of thin air , meaning “from an unknown place or source.” For example, She made up this excuse out of thin air , or The car appeared out of thin air . However, out of the blue is not precisely an antonym (see under out of a clear blue sky ).

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Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

Hundreds of people joined police, sniffer dogs and the military in a search the following day, but the toddler appeared to have vanished into thin air.

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Those lawsuits, investigations, and convictions wouldn’t have miraculously disappeared into thin air, and in all likelihood, Trump might have spent the rest of his time on earth in court or in jail.

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This, despite getting nothing from her subject save for breadcrumb trails that went cold, leads that dissolved into thin air.

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And then the Eye disappeared into thin air.

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That’s the route familiar from countless documentaries and books, including the 1997 classic “Into Thin Air.”

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

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into thin air

Idioms and Phrases

Example Sentences