Etymology: Middle English congye, congie, -eye, < 12–14th cent. Old French cungied, -et, conget, nominative congiez, congeé, 15th cent. congié, modern French congé, Provençal comjat, conjat, Catalan comiat, (Italian from Old French, congedo) < Latin commeātus ‘passage, leave to pass’, hence ‘leave of absence, furlough’, < commeāre to go and come, pass, < com- together + meāre to go, pass. From the 15th to 17th centuries the word was completely naturalized, and bade fair to descend into modern English as congy; but since the Restoration, old senses have become obsolete, and there has been a growing tendency to treat the word as French, either in the naturalized form congee (compare grandee), or, more recently, in the alien form congé (now alone used in senses 4, 6).

Etymology: < Old French congeer, congier, < congié noun: compare Provençal conjiar . (In 15th cent. altered to congedier after Italian congedare , < Old French: see congee n.²) But some of the English senses are directly taken from the noun, of which the verb has been treated as an immediate derivative. (Formerly stressed conˈgey, conˈgee.)

Etymology: < Gujarati kā̃jī rice water (used as liquid food and as starch for stiffening cloth) < Prakrit kañjiya < Tamil kañci (or a related word in another Dravidian language) + -ya, suffix.Sense 2 developed within English (the Chinese word for the dish is the unrelated zhōu ). For a similar sense development compare Portuguese canja (1563 as canje ), which is now typically used to denote a type of soup made from rice and chicken stock. In the forms congé and congée probably by association with borrowings from French ending in -é or -ée (see -ee suffix¹).