Origin of the British expression “bloody?”?

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ankita c

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Today’s word bloody comes to us from Old English, where it was blodig. The Old English version comes ultimately from the Germanic *blotham, whose derivative *blothjan gaves us English bleed. German blut, Dutch bloed, and Swedish blod all come from *blotham, as well. Blood in the Romance languages comes from Latin sanguis (from which English gets sanguine), and the Greek word for blood was haima (English hemorrhage, hematoma, etc. come from the Greek source). As far as bloody being used as a chiefly British expletive, that dates from the 17th century. There is not a widely accepted explanation for its origin. One suggests that the word is a contraction of by our Lady, our Lady being Mary, the mother of God; another explanation is that the word became an `intensive,’ as linguists call such words, by way of the nickname for Mary I of England, Bloody Mary.

Most well known as part of the phrase “Bloody hell!” which could best be described as an exclamation of surprise, shock or anger. Bloody can also be used in the middle of sentences for emphasis in a similar way to the ubiquitious f— word (“And then he had the cheek to call me a bloody liar!”) or even with particular audacity in the middle of words (“Who does she think she is, Cinde-bloody-rella?”). I am reliably informed by a contributor that bloody is in fact nothing to do with blood and actually a contraction of the phrase “by Our Lady”.