Depart is the middle rung of a three-word ladder: go is native, depart came from French, and exit came straight from Latin. All three describe leaving, and English kept all three because they sit at different heights — the plain word, the polite word, and the formal or technical word.
The original meaning was quite different from the modern one. Old French departir meant "to divide, distribute, separate," from Latin partire, "to part," and English used it that way from the mid-1200s: to depart was to part from one another, or to separate a thing into pieces. The modern sense of going away is from about 1300. That older transitive use survived longest in the marriage service, which read "till death us depart" — till death separate us — until it was changed in 1662. The euphemism for dying dates from around 1500.
depart (v.) mid-13c., departen , "part from each other, part company;" late 13c., "separate into parts," original senses now archaic or obsolete, from Old French departir (10c.) "to divide, distribute; separate (oneself), depart; die," from Late Latin departire "to divide" (transitive), from de- "from" (see de- ) + partire "to part, divide," from pars (genitive partis ) "a part, piece, a share, a division" (from PIE root *pere- (2) "to grant, allot"). From c. 1300 as "go or move away, withdraw;" late 14c. as "leave, quit." As a euphemism for "to die" ( depart this life "leave the world;" compare Old French departir de cest siecle ) it is attested from c. 1500, as is the departed for "the dead," singly or collectively. The original transitive lingered in some modern English usages; until 1662 the wedding service was till death us depart . Related: Departed ; departing . also from mid-13c.
depart came in through Norman French, and its spelling follows that family's conventions.
On the register ladder
English kept all three words for this idea, one from each layer, and the rung is itself the cue: the native word is blunt and concrete, the French one polite, the Latin one formal or technical.
| Old English | French | Latin |
|---|---|---|
| go | depart | exit |
Norman French in the spelling guide · guess another word's family