Middle English wel faren meant to journey well, not to receive a government check.
The Middle English compound welfare joined wel (well) and faren (to journey or to go).1 To fare well meant to travel safely, to prosper on the road. The word described a condition of a person, not a program of a government.
By the fourteenth century, welfare broadened to mean well-being or prosperity in general. The phrase common welfare or commonwealth described the shared prosperity of a political community.
The meaning shifted dramatically in the twentieth century. Welfare state entered English around 1941, attributed to Archbishop William Temple, who contrasted the welfare state with the warfare state of Nazi Germany.2 In the United States, the Social Security Act of 1935 established the first federal system of state support for the elderly, the unemployed, and dependent children.3
By the late twentieth century, welfare had acquired a narrower and more negative connotation in American English, often referring specifically to means-tested public assistance programs. The word that once meant journeying well became, for many, a synonym for government dependency.
The Beveridge Report of 1942 in Britain proposed a comprehensive system of social insurance to address what its author, William Beveridge, called the five giant evils: want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness.4