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To obviate a problem is to stop it from arising, or — more often — to obviate the need for something: you make that need go away. A good map obviates the need to ask for directions. A new machine may obviate a slow hand step. This is a formal, slightly official verb. Teachers, reports, and careful writing use it; friends almost never do. They would say “this means we don't have to…” People sometimes stretch it toward “avoid,” which is close but not quite the same. If you avoid a problem, you walk around it. If you obviate it, you take away the reason it exists, so there is nothing left to walk around. You will almost only meet this as a verb. Do not let the look of the word pull you toward obvious: they sit near each other in history, but they do different jobs now.
免除、使變得不必要
組成Borrowed from Latin obviātus, the “having-been-blocked” form of obviō, “to block, to hinder,” plus the English verb ending -ate. First used in English in the 1500s.
同家族的字
- obviousboth go back to Latin built on ob- plus via (a way): obvious is “right in the way, so you cannot miss it”; obviate is “meet it in the way and block it”
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
obviateverb詞源 1/ˈɒb.viˌeɪt/
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To anticipate and prevent or bypass (something which would otherwise have been necessary or required); to render (something) unnecessary.
- […] and in the kindest manner she now urged Fanny’s taking one for the cross and to keep for her sake, saying everything she could think of to obviate the scruples which were making Fanny start back at first with a look of horror at the proposal.
- The door it was necessary to keep ajar in hers, as in most cottages, because of the smoke; but she obviated the effect of the ribbon of light through the chink by hanging a cloth over that also.
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To avoid (a future problem or difficult situation).
- A mild dose of a warm active aperient to obviate costiveness, or to produce two motions daily, is generally very beneficial.
- If the predisposition to the disease has arisen from a plethoric state of the system, or from a turgescence in the vessels of the head, this is to be obviated by bleeding, both generally and topically, but more particularly the latter; an abstemious diet and proper exercise; and by a seton in the neck.
obviatenoun詞源 2
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human-scienceslinguisticssciencesSynonym of obviative.
obviateadj詞源 2
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human-scienceslinguisticssciencesSynonym of obviative.
- Colville has a rich deictic system with forms which distinguish, for example, between source and location, with each possibility characterized as proximate and obviate as well (Mattina, 1973).
- The renovated system involved an obviate-proximate pronominal alternation (yu- vs. mu- respectively in Tolowa; see Bommelyn 1997), with the pronouns coming most likely out of the deictic pronoun system.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。