out of thin air

1. 1.

   without warning

   “your cousin arrived out of thin air”

   Synonymsout of nothingfrom nowhere

Questions about out of thin air

What does out of thin air mean?

out of thin air means "without warning".

What is another word for out of thin air?

Close synonyms include out of nothing, from nowhere. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is out of thin air a common word?

out of thin air is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.