DEPARTING OBITUARIES

The word obituary was first used in English by an Anglican bishop White Kennett in a 1701 translation. This comes from the Medieval Latin word obituarius, which meant "death record" but had a more literal definition of "pertaining to death". The root is obitus, or "departure" (which was metaphorically applied to passing away later on), a conjugation of obire​, "to come to". Obire is composed of the prefix ob-, meaning "toward" in this context (from Proto-Indo-European hepi, "near"), and the verb ire, meaning "to go" (derives from PIE heyti, same denotation). The colloquial obit was first formed from obituary in 1874 - an example of our ever-shortening language - and usage of the word obituary peaked in the late 1980s.