BLIGHTY

[Q] From Sally Marden: Thank you for a fabulous site! I stumbled on it while looking for the derivation of Old Dart, since I am a Brit living in Australia and had no idea why the locals referred to England so. However, since finding that, I’ve been asked by an Ocker where the term Old Blighty comes from, and was appalled to realise I had no idea. Can you help please?

[A] 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.

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