obvious

16th century, from Latin obvius (“being in the way so as to meet, meeting, easy to access, at hand, ready, obvious”), from ob- (“before”) + via (“way”). In order to avoid an awkward form such as *obvy, the Latin ending -us was maintained in the form -ous (which is otherwise equivalent to Latin -osus).

• (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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obvious (comparative more obvious, superlative most obvious)

1. Easily discovered, seen, or understood; self-explanatory.
   • 1910, Emerson Hough, chapter II, in The Purchase Price: Or The Cause of Compromise, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, OCLC 639762314, page 0147:

     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.

• See also Thesaurus:obvious.

• unobvious
• non-obvious
• subtle

• obviously
• obviousness

• plain
• clear
• evident
• manifest

• obvious in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
• obvious in The Century Dictionary, The Century Co., New York, 1911