Blighty

[marc leroux]

I know that the soldiers referred to England as "Blighty" when talking about wounds or being wounded, but they didn't seem to use the term when referring ot leaves, or anything else.

Can someone educate me on the origins of the term?

TIA

marc

[auchonvillerssomme]

Deriving from the Hindustani word bilāyatī (विलायती), meaning "foreign", related to the Arabic word wilayat, meaning a kingdom or province.

But i'm sure others out there will disagree.

Mick

[Lorac]

I 'googled' and got this:-

'Blighty' is another nickname for Britain. In the first World War, soldiers would pray for a 'blighty'. This was a wound that would get them back to 'Blighty' for treatment. Some people say it's a corruption 0f 'beauty' but more probably it's derived from a Hindu word meaning 'stranger' and picked up by the British while ruling India.

Regards

Lorac

[Jim Clay]

Marc

A quick google on blighty +origins gave me the unsurprising info that "blighty" comes from the Hindu "bila yati" meaning foreign.

Jim

(And I see that Mick has beaten me to this, but what the heck ...no disagreement here, Mick )

[HarryBettsMCDCM]

"A Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins" expands on the foregoing:~

"Blighty is a legacy of British rule in India,Originally a term used by British Soldiers serving in India for 'Home'~'Britain'.it is an anglicization of the Hindi 'bilayat'.which meant 'Foreign' particularly European,this was actually a borrowing from Arabic 'wilayat'~'for district or country,which was independantly accquired by the English in the 19th Century in its Turkish form vilayet,a derivative of the Arabic verb waliya to rule..."

[Guest geoff501]

A dictionary of Great War slang, with origins of most words, can be found here:

http://sir.cyivs.cy.edu.tw/~hchung/warslang.htm

The mother site seems to have gone.

[michaeldr]

By the way,

as pointed out above this word was brought back from India where 'billayat' = kingdom

In the Indian context 'kingdom' meant England and so the word was added to other things to signify their Englishness

For example 'billayati pani' meant English water, or Soda Water to you and me

From Charles Allen's 'Plain Tales from the Raj'

regards

Michael

[marc leroux]

Thanks everyone.

as pointed out above this word was brought back from India where 'billayat' = kingdom

In the Indian context 'kingdom' meant England and so the word was added to other things to signify their Englishness

Michael, this is perfect.

marc

[Lorraine CJ]

Just a little bit of the same, plus a bit extra on the word BLIGHTY:

It’s a relic of British India. It comes from a Hindi word bilayati, foreign, which is related to the Arabic wilayat, a kingdom or province. Sir Henry Yule and Arthur C Burnell explained in their Anglo-Indian dictionary, Hobson-Jobson, published in 1886, that the word was used in the names of several kinds of exotic foreign things, especially those that the British had brought into the country, such as the tomato (bilayati baingan) and especially to soda-water, which was commonly called bilayati pani, or foreign water.

Blighty was the inevitable British soldier’s corruption of it. But it only came into common use as a term for Britain at the beginning of the First World War in France about 1915. It turns up in popular songs There’s a ship that’s bound for Blighty, We wish we were in Blighty, and Take me back to dear old Blighty, put me on the train for London town, and in Wilfred Owen’s poems, as well as many other places.

In modern Australian usage, Old has been added, as in Old Country and Old Dart, as a sentimental reference to Britain.

LCJ