# Has “passed away” always been a straight euphemism for “died”? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 5, 2019, 6:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-passed-away-always-been-a-straight-euphemism-for-died/841306 "2019-10-05T06:02:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Ann\_Hedonia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ann_hedonia/32/319_2.png) [@Ann\_Hedonia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ann_Hedonia)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2019, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-passed-away-always-been-a-straight-euphemism-for-died/841306/41 "2019-10-26T15:12:12Z")
I’ve told this story before, but I used to work with an online cancer support group. There was a young woman on the group whose young husband was dying of cancer. I suspect woman had heard the expression “ passed away” but had never seen it written. Her last post to the group was titled **My Husband Past Away**. I always thought there was something touching and oddly appropriate in this construct, even though it was accidental. ---
**Author:** ![hibernicus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hibernicus/32/2802_2.png) [@hibernicus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hibernicus)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2019, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-passed-away-always-been-a-straight-euphemism-for-died/841306/42 "2019-10-26T17:58:47Z")
Here is an example of the term “passed away” where a man was killed in an industrial accident while dismantling gas rigs. Definitely not limited to a quiet death in a peaceable setting. > **[Man dies following UK harbour industrial accident](https://www.hazardexonthenet.net/article/175328/Man-dies-following-UK-harbour-industrial-accident.aspx)** > > One person has died and another seriously injured following an industrial accident at the outer harbour site in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. The incident happened on October 17 when the two men were working to dismantle a gas rig. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2019, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-passed-away-always-been-a-straight-euphemism-for-died/841306/43 "2019-10-26T18:39:55Z")
> [@KarlGauss](#): > > I’ve noticed ‘passed away’ being used more frequently by the police when announcing deaths to the public. > > Used to be you’d hear, “seven people were killed in the crash”. Now, it’s more like "seven people passed away Were they on a two-lane road when the driver tried to get by slow traffic on a hill? ---
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2019, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-passed-away-always-been-a-straight-euphemism-for-died/841306/44 "2019-10-26T22:04:36Z")
> [@Aspidistra](#): > > Looking at the [ngram viewer](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=passed+away&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cpassed%20away%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cpassed%20away%3B%2Cc0) results for the phrase is interesting. You do see individual people “passing away” as early as the nineteenth century, but that big bulge in the middle is mostly not that - it’s a whole heap of Bible references (“heaven and earth had passed away”), plus “former generations” (rather than individuals) passing away, plus even quite mundane things like a person travelling to another town “passing away” by going down the road. In speech, which ngram doesn’t index, even today _pass away_ is by far most collocated with death by natural causes, such as “cancer,” specific forms of cancer, or “heart attack.” If we exclude printed instances in obituaries, (which mechanically employ this expression in a formalized way), it tends to be used more in speech. Over all, though, it seems from a quick survey that _pass away_ is most frequently used without mentioning the cause of death (_passed away in his sleep_, _passed away at the age of XX_, etc.) and I see no indication that this has changed since the 1990s. In 1993, Howard Dean said on the PBS Newshour: “Carroll Campbell and I sat with the President and Ira Magaziner and the First Lady for almost a year now with Roy Roemer and George Wilson before he **passed away in that plane crash**.” In 2003, a CNN anchor said, " A reminder that John Holliman, unfortunately, **passed away in a tragic car accident** a few years ago, otherwise, he’d be with us, as well." From looking over the data quickly (in COCA), it seems that collocations with a violent form of death tend to be when describing deaths having occurred further in the past. I would be curious to see which data or specific examples the OP is referring to that indicate any real change in the usage of _pass away_. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2019, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-passed-away-always-been-a-straight-euphemism-for-died/841306/45 "2019-10-26T22:25:02Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > I’m with Aspidistra here. The original euphemism for death is that a person “passed away.” But my feeling is that the shortening to “passed” is not so much because the “away” is understood, but because, as euphemisms often do, “passed away” now means “died” so literally that people have become reluctant to say “passed away” for the same reason they’re reluctant to say “died,” so now “passed” is a euphemism for “passed away,” which was a euphemism for “died.” Right. This is known as the “euphemism treadmill.” The crippled-handicapped-disabled-whatever it is now sequence being the canonic example. ---
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2019, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-passed-away-always-been-a-straight-euphemism-for-died/841306/46 "2019-10-26T22:29:04Z")
> [@Ignotus](#): > > Off topic: How can you tell that from the Google ngram statistics? Is there a way to exclude certain texts (like, say, the Bible) from the corpus? Sorry, I’m kinda stupid about these things! 🙂 > [@Aspidistra](#): > > I just go to the links down the bottom which are ordered by chunks of time, and start browsing around. You can get a vague sense, with a little sampling, of how words are evolving in meaning over the decades. It’s not particularly scientific 😉 Yes, Google Ngram is a nice resource, but if you really want to study usage, you need to use a real corpus, where each word is coded. Ngram only looks at books, so it doesn’t track spoken language, which is its major inadequacy. It also doesn’t allow you to search for collocations by word form, or do a cumulative search for lexemes. For example, if you’re looking for instances of a term like _drive (someone) crazy_, you have to search for _drive crazy_, _driving crazy_, _drove crazy_, and _has/had/have driven crazy_ all separately. Also, with a corpus, you can sort out the newspapers from the magazines and speech, to see how many instances are in something like an obituary, where you kind of have to use the phrase _pass away_, as it’s part of the discursive formula for that kind of publication. On the other hand, the great value of Google Ngram is that it goes way back in history. Most corpora go back only to the 1990s. It all really depends upon the nature of the question you are researching. ---
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2019, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-passed-away-always-been-a-straight-euphemism-for-died/841306/47 "2019-10-26T23:34:54Z")
Here is a [search for noun forms that collocate 1-3 positions after _passed away_](https://i.postimg.cc/YqymTLJL/passed-away.jpg), broken down by spoken language, newspapers, magazines, academic and fiction, disaggregated by the last three decades. “Accident” is #16 in frequency. I don’t see any other words which would indicate violent forms of death. The first word following was set to a preposition wildcard, so it included phrases like:\*passed away from . . . passed away in . . . passed away during . . . \*etc. This is a corpus of 560 million words from 1990 to 2017, equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-passed-away-always-been-a-straight-euphemism-for-died/841306.md?page=2)