emigrate

Etymology

It is borrowed from Latin ēmigrō (“to move out of a house or district, to remove, drive out”), on the stem of its past participle ēmigrātus,^[2][3][4][5] formed from ē- (“out”), a form of ex-, and migrō (“to move”),^[2][6][7][8] from Proto-Indo-European *mei- (“to change, go, move”).^[6][7] Etymonline also allows a back-formation from emigration, recorded from the 1640s and taken from Late Latin ēmigrātiō (“removal from a place”).^[6] Skeat and Weekley derive it simply from the Latin verb.^[9][10]

Earliest recorded meaning

To move from one place to another: 1694, in an English translation of Busbecq's Four Epistles.^[2] The OED also records a short-lived adjective emigrate, "that has migrated", from 1654, in Edmund Gayton's Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixot.^[2][11]

Semantic evolution

The first sense was simply to move elsewhere, and Johnson (1755) still defined the verb as removing from one place to another.^[2][12] The modern sense, leaving one's own country to settle for good in another, is recorded by the OED from 1749;^[2] Etymonline's first example, from 1763, refers to the Acadians,^[6] and Merriam-Webster Unabridged dates the sense to 1766.^[4] Dictionaries that give only a broad date place the word in the 18th century, and Weekley calls emigrate and emigrant 18th-century words.^{[8][13][10][14]} In the 19th century it could be used transitively, of sending or helping people to settle abroad,^[2][11] and in the United States of moving to another state or territory.^[6] American slang of the 1830s also used it for simply leaving, as in a warning to get away before someone arrives.^[15] In physiology it has been used since 1869 of cells moving to another part of the body.^[2] The later French borrowing émigré was admitted by the Académie française in 1798, of nobles who left France at the Revolution.^[10]

Timeline

• 1694 – to move from one place to another.^[2]
• 1749 – to leave one's own country or region to settle in another.^[2] Etymonline dates this sense to 1763,^[6] and Merriam-Webster Unabridged to 1766.^[4]
• 1829 – transitive, to send or help a person to settle abroad.^[2]
• 1838 – in American slang, to leave.^[15]
• 1869 – of a cell, to move from its usual place to another area of the body.^[2]

Meanings

Verb

1. To leave one's home or country in order to settle in another, usually with from or to: Her grandparents emigrated from Poland to Canada.^[14][4][2]
2. (physiology) Of a cell or group of cells, to move from its place of origin or its usual position to another part of the body.^[2]
3. To migrate; to move from one place to another, also of an animal leaving its usual area.^[2][12]
4. (chiefly historical) To cause or help a person to settle abroad.^[2][11][4]

Word family

• emigration
• emigrative
• unemigrating

Related words

• emigrant
• immigrant
• immigrate
• immigration
• migrate
• migration
• migratory
• émigré

Usage notes

To emigrate is to leave a country, usually one's own, to live in another.^[3][14] To immigrate is to enter and settle in a country not one's own, and migrate covers a move made once or repeatedly.^[3]

References

1. ^ Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
4. ^ a b c d e Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
5. ^ Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
6. ^ a b c d e f Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
7. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
8. ^ a b Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
9. ^ Skeat, Walter W. (1911), A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, new ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
10. ^ a b c Weekley, Ernest (1921), An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, London: John Murray
11. ^ a b c Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
12. ^ a b Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
13. ^ Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
14. ^ a b c Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
15. ^ a b Green, Jonathon (2010), Green's Dictionary of Slang, London: Chambers; digital ed. 2016–, https://greensdictofslang.com