The Latin root meant to unseal, as though employment were a letter you could open and close.
The English word resign entered the language in the fourteenth century from Old French resigner, which came from Latin resignare, meaning to unseal, cancel, or annul.1 The Latin prefix re- (back) combined with signare (to sign or seal). To resign originally meant to unsign, to reverse a commitment that had been formally sealed.
The word carried no emotional connotation. It described a legal act, the reversal of an agreement, the way a seal on a document could be broken to void its contents.
The meaning shifted over centuries. By the sixteenth century, resign had acquired the sense of giving up willingly, yielding or surrendering. "To resign oneself" appeared as an expression of acceptance, even passivity.2 The word split into two directions: the professional act of leaving a position, and the psychological act of accepting what cannot be changed.
The professional resignation letter became a formalized practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as employment relationships became more structured. What had once been the breaking of a feudal bond or guild relationship became a standardized document, a notice period, and eventually a subject of employment law.
The phrase "the Great Resignation" entered the language in 2021, coined by Anthony Klotz, an organizational psychologist at Texas A&M, to describe the wave of voluntary departures that followed the pandemic.3 Approximately 47.4 million Americans voluntarily left their jobs in 2021.4
In Japanese, taishoku (退職) combines the characters for retreat and employment. In German, Kündigung derives from kündigen, meaning to give notice, framing the act as an announcement rather than a surrender. The Latin root, with its image of unsealing a sealed agreement, remains the most vivid.