VACUOUS: 1: emptied of or lacking content 2: marked by lack of ideas or intelligence: stupid, inane 3: devoid of serious occupation: idle
As you might have guessed, "vacuous" has the same root as "vacuum": the Latin adjective vacuus, meaning "empty." This root also gave us the noun "vacuity" (the oldest meaning of which is "an empty space") as well as the verb "evacuate" (originally "to remove the contents of: empty"). Its predecessor, the verb vacare, is an ancestor of the words "vacation" and "vacancy," as well as "void." All these words suggest an emptiness of space, or else a fleeing of people or things from one place to another. "Vacuous" first appeard in English in the middle of the 17th century, literally describing something that was empty. It acquired its figurative usage, describing one who is lacking any substance of the mind, in the mid-1800s.
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