Bye

Part of speech: interjection, noun

Pronunciation: /baɪ/

Definitions

1. A casual or informal way to say goodbye when parting ; an instance in sports where a player or team moves to the next round without competing
2. A friendly or informal parting remark used to signal departure ; a situation in sports or tournaments where a competitor progresses automatically
3. An informal phrase used to express parting or departure ; a circumstance in competitive games that allows skipping a match to advance

Etymology: "Bye" is a shortening of "goodbye," which itself began as a contraction of "God be with ye," a blessing said at parting. Over time the religious phrase wore down to "goodbye" and then to the clipped "bye," which dropped the full farewell and kept only its first syllable. The result is a word that started as a prayer for someone's safety and ended up as a throwaway wave on the way out of a room. The word also shares its spelling with the preposition "by," and the two are treated as variant forms of one another. That overlap makes the farewell feel like a close relative of "by" in the sense of "passing by" or "going by," though the link is one of spelling rather than a separate meaning.

Synonyms: farewell, goodbye

Antonyms: hello, greeting