Other forms: byes
Bye is the short goodbye you say when the conversation is over. On the phone, at the door, at the end of a message — bye, bye then, bye for now, or the doubled bye-bye people use with small children.
The other bye belongs to sport and tournaments: a competitor who gets a bye skips the round and goes straight through, because the numbers did not divide evenly. Cricket has a bye of its own, a run taken when the ball passes the bat untouched. There is also the old phrase by the bye, meaning by the way, which you meet in older novels. Three spellings to keep apart: bye is the farewell, by is the preposition (a walk by the river), and buy is what you do with money.
1interjectiongoodbyeGoodbye, said quickly at the end of a conversation.~25%
“Bye, see you on Thursday.”
2nounbyeA free pass into the next round of a competition, given when there is no opponent to play.~38%
“The top seed drew a bye and did not play until the quarter-finals.”
3nouncricketIn cricket, a run scored from a ball that nobody touched with the bat.~37%
“Four byes went to the boundary while the keeper chased.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
The tournament bye is the little word by wearing a different coat. It goes back to Old English bī, which carried the sense of being near — something standing off to one side rather than in the middle of things, which is exactly where a player with a bye stands while the round is played. The farewell bye is a separate story: it is simply the tail end of goodbye, worn down by a few million repetitions.
Old English
bī — being near
English, today
bye
Variant form of by, from Old English bī (“being near”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA