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The meaning of the phrase is well known and can be found in several online dictionaries including Cambridge and Merriam Webster. To disappear without a trace.

It appears in Shakespeare's Othello and The Tempest and may have been coined by him.

But why thin air?
Is it just for effect or is there some extra meaning?

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  • Into - and out of thin air. I wonder which came first (probably into)
    – Chris H
    Commented Jan 27 at 19:10
  • I always assumed the expression just came out of thin air.
    – jimm101
    Commented Jan 27 at 21:08

4 Answers 4

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To disappear so completely that nothing but empty air is left.

--History--

I'm going to predate Shakespeare by referencing Virgil's Aeneid (30-19 B.C.). By 1490, William Caxton had translated it into English under the title Caxton's Eneydos. This is roughly 120 years before the publication of The Tempest, and it had already been translated into Italian and French by the time Caxton translated it. According to Terrance Cave:

Much more complicated, and more interesting, is the case of The Tempest. Scholars, following the lead of Donna Hamilton, increasingly present the play as a sustained imitatio of the Aeneid.

Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford 1990), p. 289

While I can't find a handy online copy of that book, it's also educational to read Charles Martindale, who quoted Cave in his own work Shakespeare and the Classics. It's worth keeping in mind that Shakespeare would've studied Latin, so it is likely that between English and Latin he had read the Aeneid.

--Phrase--

So with the interesting history out of the way, let's look at this interpretation of the phrase. We will use this 1791 translation of the Aeneid, because it is keyword searchable. While this copy is from ~180 years after The Tempest, other translations (and the original Latin) predating the Tempest likely are along the same lines. The phrase "vanished into thin air" appears a few times (p. 139, 170, 199, 306). However, the most compelling evidence for my argument is on page 90:

...and on a sudden fled from his fight a different way, like smoke blending with thin air..

So disappearing as if he were smoke dissipating and leaving no trace that he had been there.

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  • By chance do you know the original Latin phrase?
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Mar 9 at 10:22
  • … Mercurio a metà del discorso // si tolse dal cospetto dei mortali, svanendo // lontano dagli occhi nell’aria sottile// [Mercury in mid-speech removed himself from the presence of mortals, vanishing from sight in thin air] The English translation which you link is more lyrical: “Apollo dropped his human appearance, in the midst of the interview, and into thin air far vanished out of sight.”
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Mar 9 at 14:15
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Because it’s easy to disappear into thick air

While its use today is generally metaphorical, thick air is air that contains something: tension, love, anger. But, more literally, the air can be thick with smoke or fog.

Disappearing into air thick with fog is not much of a trick. But thin air? That’s magical.

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  • Possibly, but did they have thick fogs in Shakespeare's day? I thought that was a phenomenon of coal burning Victorian times. But then I suppose we've always had fogs of various densities naturally , just not smoke enhanced ones.
    – Peter Jennings
    Commented Jan 27 at 22:47
  • In Shakespeare's day the were living in London. All the fog you need.
    – Elliot
    Commented Mar 9 at 5:05
  • Wood smoke can make the air quite thick enough.
    – Peter
    Commented Mar 9 at 5:37
  • @Elliot London wasn’t particularly foggy in Shakespeare’s day, nor is it unusually foggy now. The fogs were primarily a result of coal fired heating and cooking in the nineteenth and early 20th century.
    – Dale M
    Commented Mar 9 at 5:38
  • @Peter in 1500 London was home to about 50,000 people as opposed to 5 million in 1900. That’s not enough fires no matter what they’re burning to make smog.
    – Dale M
    Commented Mar 9 at 5:40
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You could say it’s there for effect; air is thin—without substance. Compare, say, dark night.

From the OED . . .

thin adj., n., & adv.
II. Not dense or abundant.
II.3.b. transferred and figurative. Wanting body or substance; unsubstantial; intangible. Also in to vanish (melt, etc.) into thin air: to disappear completely from sight or existence (formerly only of spirits). More rarely to come (etc.) out of thin air. Now chiefly colloquial.
[earliest attestion]
a1616   These our actors..were all Spirits, and Are melted into Ayre, into thin Ayre. —W. Shakespeare, Tempest (1623) iv. i. 150
Source: Oxford English Dictionary (login required)

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One of the meanings of thin, which it has had as far back as the middle ages, was "patchy" or "sparse", for example "the youth's thin beard"; the word thin could be used to describe an empty region where few people lived, and "a land full thin" could refer to a wasteland devoid of people. To disappear "into thin air" reinforces the idea that the person who is no longer there is completely gone; the place is devoid of any sign whatsoever that they were ever there.

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