Resign / Resignation

The Latin resignare combined re (back) and signare (to sign, seal). In its original sense, to resign was to unseal a document, effectively canceling or invalidating it. The word entered English through Old French in the fourteenth century and initially meant to give up, to abandon, or to relinquish a right or possession. The phrase "resign oneself to" captured this passive sense: to accept the inevitable.

In ecclesiastical and political usage, resignation meant formally giving up an office or position. When Pope Celestine V resigned the papacy in 1294, after only five months, the act was so extraordinary that Dante placed him in the vestibule of Hell for what he called the great refusal. Resignation from high office was rare enough that language had to be adapted to describe it.

The asymmetry of departure language in employment is striking. When an employee leaves, the vocabulary is personal: you resign, you give notice, you serve a notice period. When a company eliminates a position, the vocabulary is structural: the company restructures, right-sizes, optimizes its workforce. The employee's departure is framed as a personal decision. The company's action is framed as an impersonal process.

The Great Resignation, a term coined by Texas A&M University professor Anthony Klotz in May 2021, described the wave of voluntary departures from the U.S. workforce that followed the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 47.4 million Americans voluntarily left their jobs in 2021, and the number rose to 50.5 million in 2022. The term reframed individual decisions to quit as a collective phenomenon, temporarily making resignation sound less like surrender and more like a movement.