Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • transitive verb To put out (a tenant, for example) from a property by legal process; expel.
  • transitive verb To force out; eject.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To dispossess by a judicial process or course of legal proceedings; expel from lands or tenements by legal process.
  • To wrest or alienate by reason of the hostile assertion of an irresistible title, though without judicial process. See eviction, 2.
  • Hence To expel by force; turn out or remove in any compulsory way: as, to evict disturbers from a theater.
  • To evince; prove.
  • To set aside; displace; annul.
  • To force out; compel.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb (Law) To dispossess by a judicial process; to dispossess by paramount right or claim of such right; to eject; to oust.
  • transitive verb obsolete To evince; to prove.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb transitive To expel (one or more people) from their property; to force (one or more people) to move out.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb expel from one's property or force to move out by a legal process
  • verb expel or eject without recourse to legal process

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English evicten, from Latin ēvincere, ēvict-, to vanquish : ē-, ex-, intensive pref.; see ex– + vincere, to defeat; see weik- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin evincere, "to vanquish completely."

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