Fare-thee-well or fare-you-well are AmE expressions which appear to date back to the late 18th century:
(informal chiefly US) a state of perfection: the steak was cooked to a fare-thee-well. (Collins Dictionary)
According to Etymonline its related meaning, to the last degree is from late 19th century:
Expression to a fare-thee-well "to the last degree" is by 1884, American English.
Its origin is unclear, the Phrase Finder has no clue:
Curiously, the OED has nothing (that I could find) for "fare-thee-well," but has this: "U.S. colloq.
to a fare-you-well: to the last point; to the utmost degree; completely." No explanation in either dictionary of why a synonym for "good-bye" has taken on this meaning.
The AHD appears to suggest that its meaning is an extension of its literary one:
[From fare thee well, may it go well with you, goodbye.]
Where does the current meaning of this AmE idiomatic expression come from?
Is there a reason why it evolved in AmE and not in BrE given that “fare thee well”, literally speaking, were known and used in both sides of the pond?
Best Answer
My research suggests that at least a strong influence on the use of '[done] to a fare-you-well' (also later '[done] to a fare-thee-well') in the sense of "[done] to perfection", with reference to food, was quite probably the generalization and colloquial adoption of the sense of 'farewell' in the earlier noun phrase 'farewell blow' used both half-literally (a metaphorical 'goodbye' or 'farewell' along with a literal stroke or blow that puts an end to something), and wholly metaphorically.
For the noun 'fare-you-well' (the earlier variant with the pertinent sense), OED specifies "U.S. Colloq.", and derives it from the verb 'to fare'. The verbal sense cross-referenced is
OED provides, however, as the only definition of 'fare-you-well', its use in the phrase
The OED's earliest attestation, from the 1886 (1884 copyright date) publication of Dr. Sevier (George W. Cable) is surprisingly infirm but, finally, perhaps justified. The attestation is
That version of the quote, from the 1886 standalone publication, differs from the earlier (1884) version of the story as published in the September 1884 (copyright date 1883) edition of The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, where it appears with a comma between "buttermilk to" and "fare-you-well".
The complete context, however, suggests the interpretation given by OED may be correct, regardless of what might be either editorial insertion or deletion of a comma, because the passage is devoted to various expressions of finality:
With the comma (and correction of "to" to "too"), 'fare-you-well' in the passage seems to have interjectory force, with the meaning being "that's it" or "that's all". Without the comma (the later version), the meaning of 'buttermilk to fare-you-well' seems to be something like "buttermilk to put you right" or "buttermilk to top it off".
Although OED doesn't attest the appearance of the sense again until 1910, I find it twice in 1892 with a meaning approximating 'a final blow':
Subsequent to those 1892 appearances, the phrase begins to be used frequently with the general sense of 'to finality, to the end, to perfection' in various contexts in the popular press: horse-racing (1893); sale prices for clothing (two distinct uses in 1894, with repetition of one in early 1895; another in 1896); commercial enterprise successes (1894); the beating of tenor drums (1894); methods of nominating candidates (1895); legal battle (1896); the fate of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner after the shooting of the albatross (1896); a commercial success (1896); brasswork polish (1896); commercial successes generally (1896); football center position play (1896); explanation of mysterious matters (1896); Republican party resolutions (1896); and etc. into the next century.
Noting the similar but earlier figurative and semi-literal uses of 'farewell blow', a phrase used with comparable frequency in the US and the UK to mean 'a blow or another action that completes [something]', I investigated those uses.
I found the phrase in use throughout the 1800s. Many appearances in the later 1800s were in a widely reprinted (in the U.S.) story about a miner discovering the "Welcome Stranger" gold nugget in Australia. The story was first printed in 1884, and appeared throughout 1885 into 1886:
The 'farewell blow' in this story is a blow that precipitates success. So also are many of the other literal or figurative 'farewell blows', in popular and other literature, completing blows that bring at least a partial triumph or success. Aside from the obvious, wherein a half-literal 'farewell blow' is a literal blow that finishes a conflict with the triumph or success of the thing or person inflicting the blow — the same underlying sense of 'triumph or success in completion' found in many early uses of '[to a] fare-you-well', as well as in the later culinary sense of 'done to a fare-you-well' used with the meaning of 'done to perfection' — the context of figurative uses of 'farewell blow' usually connotes "the completing or perfecting action".
In all of these (and other) uses of the standard phrase 'farewell blow', that phrase may be replaced without loss of meaning with the colloquial 'fare-you-well'.