You probably say “goodbye” multiple times a day without thinking twice. It’s the way you bid farewell to a friend, partner, relative, coworker, etc. And the word is so ordinary that most people never consider where it actually came from.
As it turns out, its origins are religious.
″‘Goodbye’ began as ‘God be with ye,’ with the first sighting as early as 1565,” Madeline Enos, a language trends expert and communications manager at the language learning platform Preply, told HuffPost.
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“Over time, the phrase shrank, the spelling changed, and the religious meaning faded. Today it’s one of the most common ways to end a conversation in English.”
That kind of shortening remains very common in English, noted Michael Adams, an English professor at Indiana University.
“To be honest, English speakers just like fewer syllables, so it’s very likely some sort of abbreviation will occur to some people – in this case, a way of saying it recognisably but more easily than ‘God be with you’ or ‘God be with ye,’” he explained.
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Add in the “Great Vowel Shift” that occurred around the 15th and 16th centuries and you can see how the pronunciation of the English language changed over time as well.
“The English word is a contraction of ‘God be with ye,’ compressed over centuries of everyday use into something said entirely on autopilot,” said Noel Wolf, a linguist and cultural expert at the language learning platform Babbel. “The phrase passed through stages ― ‘God be with ye,’ then ‘godbwye,’ then ‘goodbye,’ each shortening a small act of erosion by daily use.”
One of the earliest written records of the word comes from 1573 in a letter by English writer and scholar Gabriel Harvey, who wrote: “To requite your gallonde [gallon] of godbwyes, I regive you a pottle [half-gallon] of howdyes.”
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“It does remind us that these can be complicated issues, the way that sounds change and words are formed over centuries,” Adams said. “If you’re not paying attention, you can miss what makes a current word what it is. It’s never a static thing. And what’s interesting is now people think “goodbye” means “good wishes,” but really the ‘good’ comes from ‘God.’ The word ‘God’ was extended phonetically into ‘good.’”
He added that the phrase “God be with you” still exists – it has just become something separate from “goodbye” in people’s minds today.
“It is a neat illustration of how the language people use without thinking a dozen times a day can uncover history,” Wolf said. “Every time someone says goodbye, whether it be hanging up the phone, leaving the office, dropping kids at school gates, they are unwittingly invoking a 500-year-old blessing.”
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Enos also pointed to goodbye as an example of the durability of history through language, even when people aren’t aware of the backstory.
“English speakers have been saying some version of ‘goodbye’ for more than 400 years,” she said. “Since then the word has survived religious upheaval, industrialisation, and the digital age. ‘Goodbye’ has withstood the test of time.”
Cavan Images via Getty Images
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It’s not just in English where the word for farewell carries religious meaning.
″‘Goodbye’ in Romance languages is similar – ‘adieu’ comes from the French ‘à Dieu,’ meaning ‘to God,’” Enos explained. ”‘Vaya con Dios’ directly translates to ‘go with God’ in Spanish – it was just never contracted or secularised. It is fascinating to see languages arrive at the same idea, placing someone in the care of a higher power to remain safe when parting, very poetic.”
The Spanish adiós is the same as adieu, literally meaning “to God.” The goodbye salutations in other languages offer similar sentiments.
“Arabic ma’a salama means ‘go with peace,‘” Wolf said. “Hebrew ‘shalom’ – used for both greeting and farewell – carries the broader meaning of wholeness and harmony. The Japanese ‘oshare ni’, loosely ‘go well’, and the Swahili ‘kwaheri’, derived from the Arabic for ‘may you be well,’ echo the same impulse from entirely different linguistic traditions. The instinct to protect someone at the moment of parting appears to be close to universal.”
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She emphasised this cross-cultural instinct to treat the moment of parting as something that requires a little more than simple small talk.
“Whether through religious commendation, a wish for safety or an expression of peace, languages have tended to load their farewells with their deepest values,” Wolf said. “The cosmologies that produced these words have largely faded. The words themselves have not.”
“Goodbye” is also not the only word in the English language with religious origins that many people aren’t aware of.
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“Many everyday words began with religious meanings before gradually becoming secular,” Enos said. ”‘Holiday’ comes from ‘holy day.’ And ‘gossip’ originally referred to a godparent or close family friend, then extended to close family friend and eventually to someone who does idle talk, then the idle talk itself.”
Wolf gave the example of saying “bless you” after a sneeze, which many attribute to Pope Gregory I. During a plague, the religious leader supposedly encouraged Christians to respond to sneezes with genuine prayer – a tradition that deepened in subsequent health crises.
“Another interesting example is the word silly,” Wolf said. “In Old English, the term ‘silly’ originally meant ‘blessed,’ before drifting through ‘innocent’ and ‘deserving of pity’ on its journey to its current meaning. ‘Disaster’ carries the literal meaning of a bad alignment of the stars. The Italian equivalent, ‘disastro’, shares the same root, ‘dis’ meaning bad, ‘astro’ meaning star, as does the French ‘désastre’ – suggesting a shared ancient anxiety about the heavens governing human fate written across multiple languages simultaneously.”
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Adams offered another fun example: the exclamation “Jiminy Cricket”.
“It’s a light euphemism that derives from words for Jesus Christ,” he explained. “It becomes a name for a cartoon cricket later, but at first, it was an exclamation that allowed people to not take the name of God in vain.”
Indeed, many connect “Jiminy Cricket” to the Italian “Gesù Cristo” and the Latin “Jesu Domine,” There was also the old-fashioned euphemism “criminy” and “gemini,” which are believed to have religious backstories.
So phrases like “Jiminy Cricket” evolved as a sort of linguistic loophole – much the same way ‘sugar’ became a stand-in for a different four-letter word, or ‘fudge’ for another…
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“English is dense with this kind of residue,” Wolf said. “Centuries of religion, superstition and cultural encounter compressed into words that now simply mean whatever we need them to mean.”
