Going by, through, and beyond
To pass, in ordinary English, is to go by something, through it, or beyond it. The same verb also means to succeed at a test, to hand an object along, to enact a law, to die in the milder phrasing pass away, and, at a card table, to decline a turn. As a noun it can be a gap in a mountain range, a ticket that lets you in, or the throw that sends a ball to a teammate. Those uses look scattered until they sit back on one picture: movement from one side of a limit to the other.
A French loan in Middle English
English did not grow this verb from Old English stock. It borrowed it. Middle English passen comes from Old French passer, already in use in the eleventh century for stepping, walking, and going through. The Oxford English Dictionary treats the English verb as a French borrowing. Merriam-Webster names the immediate source Anglo-French, the French written in medieval England, which is the same loan seen from the English side of the Channel.
First dates differ by a few decades. The Oxford English Dictionary cites evidence from about 1225 in Hali Meidenhad, a West Midlands prose homily. Other standard accounts place the verb later in the thirteenth century, often toward its end. One common range given for the Middle English form is 1175–1225. The mismatch is about how tightly a manuscript can be dated, not about the direction of travel. By the later 1200s the word is at home in English in two physical uses: going by something, and crossing over it. Around 1300 the intransitive sense, to go on and make one’s way, is also on record.
Native English already had verbs of walking and going. The French loan supplied a compact way to talk about motion past a point or through a barrier. Histories of the Middle English verb note that it took over some of the ground once covered by Old English gengan.
A Latin step, stretched into a verb
Old French passer rests on a reconstructed Vulgar Latin *passare, to step, walk, or pass. Spanish pasar and Italian passare are the same spoken-Latin formation. That verb was built on classical Latin passus, a step or pace. Romans also used passus as a measure: five Roman feet, the length of a double stride.
Passus is the past participle of pandere, to spread or stretch, including stretching the leg in a stride. Behind that Latin verb lies a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root meaning to spread or stretch out. Handbooks write the root in two slightly different shapes, *pete- and *peth₂-. Those are rival spellings of one reconstruction, not two competing family trees.
The same Latin noun explains why English also has pace. Pace entered Middle English from Old French pas, a step, from passus. The mountain pass, a narrow way through high ground, is that noun applied to landscape: a place where a path can go through. Some historians of English have argued that this topographic sense began as a spelling of pace and was later pulled toward pass by French pas and by the English verb. Other dictionaries list the mountain sense as a straight continuation of Old French pas. The two stories meet at Latin passus either way.
Distant cousins from the spreading root include Old English fæðm, the reach of the outstretched arms, which became fathom, and Greek words for spreading out and for a leaf, a flat spread surface. They share ancestry; they did not give English the verb.
Around the same family English later collected passage, passenger, once a traveler or passer-by, and passport, leave to go through a port or gate. The English past participle also split: passed stayed with the verb, while past became a separate adjective, adverb, preposition, and noun for time already gone and for the act of going by.
Senses that kept moving
After English had a verb for going by, later meanings are mostly the same motion aimed at new objects.
Late in the fourteenth century, to pass time is to undergo it as it goes by. Early in the fifteenth, to pass an examination is to get through a trial the way one gets through a gate. Later that century, events that come to pass are things that go through to completion. By the 1590s a pass as written permission lets a person enter or cross a place; the free-admission ticket is later still, from the 1830s. Also in the 1590s, to pass as something is to be accepted as equivalent. In the twentieth century that idea specialized into racial passing, being taken for a member of a group one is not assigned to, recorded from 1935 and built on the older phrase pass oneself off as, known from the early nineteenth century.
Games and sport added more. Transferring a ball or puck to a teammate is attested around 1865. Declining to take a turn, first in euchre, is recorded from 1869; the noun for a declined bid in bridge appears in 1923. The colloquial make a pass, an amorous advance, is on record by 1928. Sources often link it, with some caution, to a sporting thrust in fencing or football rather than to the mountain gap.
None of these later uses needed a new root. They reused the image of getting past a barrier, handing something across a space, or letting a turn go by.
What French kept that English split
A small spelling split still shows the old motion. Spanish pasar, Italian passare, and French passer keep a clearly verbal shape. English shortened the loan to pass and let pace hold the measured step. The leftover is past: once the same participle as passed, now the ordinary word for time behind us. The origin of the word pass is easier to see there than in any of the later special senses: a stretched stride that became a way of talking about going through.