The Etymology of Bonfire
Bonfire is recorded from 1483 as banefire — a "bone-fire", from Old English bān (bone) and fȳr (fire). The original fires were exactly that: heaps of animal bones burned to dispose of carcasses, and, during outbreaks of plague, sometimes of human bones too. Funeral pyres, midsummer fires, and fires lit by parish authorities to mark the end of a livestock cull were all banefires. By the sixteenth century the spelling and pronunciation had drifted toward bonfire, and the word was generalising to mean any large outdoor fire — celebration as well as cremation. The pleasing folk etymology — that bonfire means "good fire", from French bon — is just that: folk etymology, attested as a guess from the 1700s but not the actual source. The Anglo-Saxon bone-image is the historical truth. Guy Fawkes Night fires, Midsummer Eve fires, garden bonfires of leaves: all share a name with the funeral pyres of medieval England.