I always thought that the word ‘good’ came from ‘god’. After all, didn’t ‘good-bye’ derive from ‘God be with ye‘?

Well, yes it did. But that happened later.

It turns out that ‘good’ and ‘god’ come from completely different places.

According to the OED, the word ‘good’ comes from an Old Teutonic root ‘gôđ’ which meant ‘to bring together’. You can even tell that the word ‘gather’ comes from this. This source, on the other hand, has it as coming from a Proto-Indo-European hypothetical root ‘*ghedh-‘, meaning the same thing. Either way, the word meant something like ‘fitting’, or ‘suitable’, and in time, good.

There are two possibilities for the origin of ‘god‘ though, and both are from Proto-Indo-European. Either it’s ‘*ghut-‘ meaning “that which is invoked”, or ‘*ghu-to-‘ from “poured”, as you’d pour on offering on the ground for the gods to drink.

Not surprising, though, that the two words would converge as they have. There always seems to be more than one motivation for how words are.