obvious definition

English

Etymology

16th century, from Latin obvius (“being in the way so as to meet, meeting, easy to access, at hand, ready, obvious”), from ob- (“before”) + via (“way”).^[1] In order to avoid an awkward form such as *obvy, the Latin ending -us was maintained in the form -ous (which is otherwise equivalent to Latin -osus), just like in previous (contrast envious).

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈɑb.vi.əs/, (fast speech) /ˈɑ.vi.əs/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈɒ.vɪəs/, /ˈɒb.vɪəs/, (fast speech) /ˈɒv.jəs/
• Hyphenation: ob‧vi‧ous

• Audio (US)

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Adjective

obvious (comparative more obvious, superlative most obvious)

1. Easily discovered, seen, or understood; self-explanatory.
   • 1910, Emerson Hough, chapter II, in The Purchase Price: Or The Cause of Compromise, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, OCLC 639762314:

     Carried somehow, somewhither, for some reason, on these surging floods, were these travelers, of errand not wholly obvious to their fellows, yet of such sort as to call into query alike the nature of their errand and their own relations. It is easily earned repetition to state that Josephine St. Auban's was a presence not to be concealed.

   • 1961 February, R. K. Evans, “The role of research on British Railways”, in Trains Illustrated, page 92:

     One of the most obvious results of the B.R. Modernisation Plan has been the increasing use of diesel and electric traction; a less obvious by-product is the increase in track damage possible with the new forms of traction.

   • 2013 August 17, “Down towns”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8849:

     It is not obvious, to economists anyway, that cities should exist at all. Crowds of people mean congestion and costly land and labour. But there are also well-known advantages to bunching up. When transport costs are sufficiently high a firm can spend more money shipping goods to clusters of consumers than it saves on cheap land and labour.

Synonyms

• See also Thesaurus:obvious.

Antonyms

• unobvious
• non-obvious
• subtle

Derived terms

• obviously
• obviousness

Translations

References

Further reading

• obvious in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913
• obvious at OneLook Dictionary Search
• obvious in Britannica Dictionary
• obvious in Macmillan Collocations Dictionary
• obvious in Ozdic collocation dictionary
• obvious in WordReference English Collocations