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Comment by zahlman | Hacker News Reader

>but if you go online and look up the definition, you will be told it also means goodbye, which it really doesn't, but I think this arises from the fact that it's a bit more relaxed form of thanks, so people frequently say it as thank you at the end of an interaction where directly thanking the person might sound a bit awkward or overly formal.

Possibly also because of the phonetic similarity with "ciao"?

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Or "tschüß". I have a friend who speaks German and frequently says goodbye with "tschüß", and one time I heard it, thought he said "cheers" (as I often do), and then realise what he'd said—and that the two sound surprisingly similar.

I used the handy audio pronunciation feature on my dictionary, and I am not a German speaker, but I can definitely see how that eggcorn might have occurred.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn

> An eggcorn is the alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements, creating a new phrase which is plausible when used in the same context. Thus, an eggcorn is an unexpectedly fitting or creative malapropism. Eggcorns often arise as people attempt to make sense of a stock phrase that uses a term unfamiliar to them, as for example replacing "Alzheimer's disease" with "old-timers' disease", or William Shakespeare's "to the manner born" with "to the manor born". The autological word "eggcorn" is itself an eggcorn, derived from acorn.

I find it a big stretch to consider 'ciao' phonetically similar to 'cheers', at least in terms of confusing them which I doubt any English speaker would.

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