Vacation shows up first in English in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, specifically in the prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale.

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In it she complains that her husband spends all his leisure time—his vacation—reading a certain book and not attending to her needs—which must have been urgent since he was her fifth husband.

This talk of books in such a famous source of our knowledge of Middle English confirms that people were reading and writing long before Chaucer took up his pen, it’s just that the further back in time you look, the fewer books survive.

Not only are books lost or destroyed, for old books there were not many to begin with.  Before the invention of the printing press all books were produced by hand. In 1476 William Caxton set up the first printing press in England and one of the first things he set about producing was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  But that was almost a century after they were written so when Chaucer used the word vacation the book he mentions would have been expensive and precious even when it was new.

No wonder the Wife of Bath received a beating when she tore a page out of it.

The roots of the word vacation are older than Chaucer and lead via Old French back to Latin to a root vacare meaning “to be empty.” The American Heritage Dictionary links this back to an Indo-European root eu meaning to “leave” or “abandon.”

So the Latin “empty” represents your office when you are on vacation.

We vacate our place of business, but more so we mentally move out of the mindset of our regular occupation, and that’s what’s at the heart of the word, a mental removal from work.

That’s why dragging your iphone or your blackberry along means you aren’t really on vacation.