obvious

Etymology

From Latin obvius (“being in the way so as to meet, meeting, easy to access, at hand, ready, obvious”), from ob- (“before”) + via (“way”).

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈɑ(b).vi.əs/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈɒ(b).vɪəs/
• 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.
   • 1915, Emerson Hough, The Purchase Price, chapterII:

     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.

   • 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.