Why Does ‘Late’ Mean “Dead”?

Usually, if someone’s late, they were supposed to be somewhere but haven’t yet arrived. So it seems a little counterintuitive that late can also describe someone who died—in other words, someone who was here but has since left. But it’s less counterintuitive if you consider the whole breadth of ways we use late. 

1. The Old Meaning of Late
2. How Late Is Used Today

The Old Meaning of Late

When the word was first adopted into Old English from Germanic tongues, people invoked it in many of the adverbial senses still common today: “after the proper, right, or expected time,” “at or until a time far into the day or night,” and “relatively near the end of a period of time, season, event, etc.,” per the Oxford English Dictionary.

Back then (and for centuries thereafter), you could also use late as a synonym for recently. “He had a fever late, and in the fit / He cursed thee and thine, both house and land,” John Keats wrote in “The Eve of St. Agnes.” These days, you can’t really deploy late in this way and expect your meaning to be understood. Still, similar senses relating to recent time remain current in late’s derivatives—as in lately and, to a lesser extent, of late.

Late as a form of “deceased” seems to have emerged from this subsect of meanings. In the early 1400s, people started using the word to describe something that existed or was true recently but now is no longer the case. A late bishop could be someone who recently got promoted to cardinal. A late tenant could be someone who recently vacated the boardinghouse. The same word could also apply to someone who died recently, and it was around this time that this usage of late became common.

How Late Is Used Today

Dictionaries often still reflect the recency part of the definition. To Merriam-Webster, late is “living comparatively recently: now deceased.” The OED says it’s used for a person “that was alive not long ago, but is not now; recently deceased.” In everyday conversation, though, people rarely take recency into consideration when using the term. This may be due to the ambiguity and relativity of “recent” as a length of time. In other words, how recently does your grandmother need to have died in order to qualify for the term late? There’s no concrete answer.

Taking the recency out of late also makes it a graceful euphemism for death at any distance. My dead husband, for example, could come off as shockingly morbid in the middle of an otherwise innocuous conversation; the clinical remove of my deceased husband might misrepresent your feelings; and my dearly departed husband is overly sentimental for certain situations. My late husband is a subtle workaround for those issues, even if the phrase’s original meaning is lost on most people.

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