Etymology

passover

Pass·o·ver
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Today it means: The one-day Biblical feast or festival (not a holy day) that begins at twilight at the beginning of the fourteenth day of the first month (Abib or Nisan 14), during which the firstborn sons of the Israelites were passed over by God while those of the Egyptians were killed; this feast day is then immediately followed by the seven-day Feast of Unleavened Bread (Nisan 15 to 21; the first and seventh days are holy days or yearly Sabbaths). Full definition →

Hebrew פֶּסַח
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The story

  1. Hebrew · calque ofפֶּסַח“to pass over”
  2. English todayPassover

Deverbal from pass over as a calque of Hebrew פֶּסַח (pésakh, “to pass over”) (see sense 1), coined by the English Biblical scholar and linguist William Tyndale (c. 1494 – 1536), in his 1530 translation of Exodus 12 of the Bible, the first in modern English: see the quotation. Displaced native Old English færeld.

Words from the same roots

Hebrewפֶּסַח all →

PesachPaschapaschpaska

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.