Bye

How to spell bye

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bye

What does bye mean?

1. interjectionA casual way of saying goodbye when parting from someone.
2. nounA position in a competition where a player or team advances to the next round without having to compete.

Bye in a sentence

• interjection

  She waved and called out a cheerful bye as the train pulled away.

• noun

  The top seed received a bye in the first round of the tournament.

• interjection

  He ended every phone call with a quick bye before hanging up.

• noun

  Because of the odd number of teams, one club was given a bye that week.

Where does bye come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This little word is a clipped form of 'goodbye', which began life in the late 1500s as a written contraction of the blessing 'God be with you'. Over time the phrase was compressed in speech and writing, and the opening 'God be' was reshaped by analogy with greetings such as 'good day' and 'good night', giving us 'goodbye'. By the 1700s speakers were trimming it further to a casual 'bye', and the doubled-up 'bye-bye' followed as an affectionate echo. The sporting sense, meaning a free pass to the next round, comes from the same spelling but a different track: it grew out of the word 'by' used in games to mean standing aside, with the spelling 'bye' settling in to mark that special use. The spelling trap is real, since 'bye', 'by', and 'buy' all sound identical, and only 'bye' carries the farewell and the sporting meanings.

How the word is built

• bye (shortened from 'goodbye', itself a contraction of 'God be with you')

Words that sound like bye

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• buy: To obtain something in exchange for money.
• by: Indicating the agent, means, route, location, or deadline associated with an action.