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. “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 recognizably but more easily than ‘God be with you’ or ‘God be with ye,’” he explained.
