It's not "passed" or "passed away", it's "died"

[SherlockHolmes]

So sick of this euphemism being used everywhere. It's not factual - no one has passed anywhere, they're dead.

I get it if it's someone close to you and you can't bring yourself to actually mention death, but it's being used in news reports etc. Utterly ridiculous.

Training as a nurse many years ago we were taught that the words dead/died/dying need to be used to make absolutely sure there could be no misunderstanding

You sound like someone with a lot of empathy for people grieving :)

Agreed it's ridiculous. Passed away, passed over, passed on and now just passed. Why cant people just say died. It drives me mad.

I’m intrigued about when certain people decided ‘dead’ or ‘died’ needed replacing with something deemed softer.

I was raised a Catholic. While there’s loads to find wanting about Catholicism, being relaxed and normal about the word ‘dead’ is not one of them. Go to a Catholic mass and ‘death’, ‘died’ and ‘dead’ are used throughout. You don’t ever hear euphemisms like ‘passed away’. Dying is a fact. It’s not something that needs softening, imo, and I don’t get why some people think it does.

Because, for some people, the word died is too painful and blunt, @Barleycat, and they find other terms easier to bear during a very difficult time.

No-one has the one, right answer here.

I am a Registrar of Births and Deaths, when we are registering the death of someone we have to get the informant to verify the date of death, the cause of death and the place of death. I hope I do so as sensitively as possible, but my job is to accurately record the facts. The most difficult part of the appointment is when a husband or wife is informing us of the death of their wife or husband and we have to inform them they are referred to as the widow/widower of the deceased, not wife /husband, now that is very hard to hear, but again I hope I tell them sensitively and with compassion. I hope my informants leave their appointment with all the information they require to do all the things they have to do in the following days. So yes for me in my role it's died/death and I use these terms outside work as well.

I suppose they are in the past.

Apologies for picking on your post rather than some others which have said the same.

My question is why haven’t social media picked up on ‘unalived’ ? Have they nodded off on the job ? If you police something you need to move with the times.

This reminds me of a quote in an old black and white film I love, This Happy Breed, great film. Slightly annoying aunt who never married and got into ‘woo’ in the 1930s.
“She didn't pass on, pass over, or pass out! She died!”
Always makes me laugh.😂
I’m a nurse, long time since I worked on general ward with dying patients, I think I used to say, he/she is gone now, very quietly. And give their hand a wee squeeze. It’s sad.

Not at all. It can mean 'no longer know where something is or what has happened to it', but by no means always.

If you lost your job because of sickness/incompetence/hands in the till or whatever reason, you would know exactly where your successor would be doing the same job.

If you lost your house, because you couldn't keep up with the mortgage payments, you would know full well that the house was still in the exact same place as it was when it was yours.

But then the chicken crossing the road joke makes no sense, if you have to use died - doesn’t work

That's a common understanding but I don't agree. I think calling "passed away" a euphemism is a traditionally shallow interpretation by people who don't really listen to the words, and fail to grasp the original meaning.

In contrast, "died" is a neutral clinical term - equally acceptable to realists and to those who believe in an afterlife.

"Passed away" is more accepting of what's actually happened, and more final. The person has gone forever and now exists only in memories, which will themselves pass away as the arrow of time demands.

It’s people being offended by it… most likely. Just like racist jokes have been completely removed from comedy movies now but not the case in the 90s and early 2000s. I think its part of censorship.

I was completely team died, as a journalist in the late 90s, early 00s, it was dead/died all the way, passed away just wasn't used. Then my beloved mum died very suddenly last year and the word became so painful to say, so emotionally charged, so final, and so cruel. Sometimes I can't even say the word. And I use passed away or even 'we lost her' which I'd always avoided in the past.

I'm in my sixties. When I was growing up only the most pearl-clutching genteel ladies said "passed away" and nobody said "passed" because people would have said "Passed what?" Death/died/dead are not "hard" words; they are precise words that served people very well for centuries. And it astonishes me that Tik-Tok, which allows oh so many appalling things to be posted on its platform, apparently won't allow one to use these words.
Recommended reading: John Donne, "Death be not proud"
PS: I have warned everyone I know that if they survive me and refer to me as having "passed" I shall come back and haunt them brutally.

Ahh she does play that. Thanks!

Can I remind posters the OP actually said (my bold)

So sick of this euphemism being used everywhere. It's not factual - no one has passed anywhere, they're dead.
I get it if it's someone close to you and you can't bring yourself to actually mention death, but it's being used in news reports etc. Utterly ridiculous.

They have acknowledged individuals struggling to use 'dead', etc. but have questioned the use in news reports etc.

I don't see it in respectable news reports. E.G. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cn0qq5nyxn0t or https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2025/07/31/allan-ahlberg-peepo-the-jolly-postman-childrens-literature/

I know you mean well, but I would find this unprofessional and actually quite insulting (but wouldn't say anything or give any indication). Just so you know.

I'm so grateful that everyone I've had to deal with following relatives' deaths has used unambiguous and non-patronising/non-infantilising language.

For someone who lost their Dad recently I must admit I struggle to use the word 'died' maybe it's temporary as part of me still feels like it hasn't sunk in yet, but it's weird as I can't bring myself to say it. This is the first significant family loss I have experienced. Maybe people are grieving and they use the word which helps them best to deal with their grief, just like I am.

So you may think it's annoying to not use the right word, but maybe the word they choose to use is helping them in some way.

It must take a very special kind of callousness to feel the need to 'correct' somebody who tells you that their loved one has 'passed away'.

I wonder how exactly that would make you feel better about yourself, seizing somebody else's moment of pain and grief for a bit of smug self-satisfaction.

Nobody whatsoever is stopping you from using 'died' if you later report the news to somebody else.

Why does it matter to you? Don't use it yourself then if it bothers you that much to start a thread about it.
If it comforts people to use a euphemism, so what.
YADBU

SOME people prefer ‘died’, while SOME prefer a euphemism like passed away. If someone is going through the death of someone they love, wouldn’t it be pretty cruel to insist they use a term that upsets or hurts them?

Surely this is a circumstance where people should be allowed to use the term they find the easiest?

Totally agree. Absolutely loathe “passed” and only marginally less infuriated by “passed away”.

I hate it too. Especially when it’s reported that a person has « passed away » in a particularly violent way.