“And they lived happily ever after” is a whimsical phrase that has been echoed in fairy tales and children’s stories for centuries. In essence, “happily ever after” creates the illusion of a neatly wrapped ending, free of loose strings and full of smiles. Nowadays, it’s also used to liken modern events to fairy tales, as in: “They moved into their dream home in the country with a white picket fence and lived happily ever after.” Not exactly a universal fairy tale, but certainly a picture-perfect ending for the characters in a romantic comedy.
To understand where this phrase came from, it helps to dissect it. “Ever after” is an old-fashioned way of saying “from that time forward.” The idiom has been in use for centuries, since the days of Old English. The addition of the adjective “happily,” however, is more recent.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the full phrase appeared in a 1702 translation of Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a collection of short stories written during the 14th century. The English translation introduced the specific wording that has since become a cliché: “Paganino, hearing the News, married the Widow, and as they were very well acquainted, so they lived very lovingly, and happily, ever after.”
The catchy phrase spread quickly, likely because “ever after” was already well established in English. Later, as the 19th-century Grimm brothers’ fairy tales — including “Cinderella” — were translated from German into English, their dark and grisly endings were softened. These kid-friendly revisions and other modern fairy tales often feature “happily ever after” as a tidy literary bow on a neatly wrapped story.
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