The tenants must ____ the apartment by the end of the month.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The landlord asked the tenants to ____ the property by the end of the month so that he could start the repairs today.
Word Origin & History
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.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"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."
— 2023 November 29, Philip Haigh, “New Piccadilly Line trains put to the test”, in RAIL, number 997, page 26:
"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."
— 2024 April 27, Maya Yang, “Disgraced former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein hospitalized”, in The Observer, →ISSN: