Get Underway
Meaning
Begin a journey or a project.
Origin
We are familiar with this little expression but, like other idioms that we absorb without question when learning the language, it doesn’t make much literal sense. Why ‘under’? Why ‘way’? It turns out that a confusing of several seafaring words had a bearing on the coining of this nautical phrase.
‘Way’ doesn’t mean here road or route but has the specifically nautical meaning of ‘the forward progress of a ship though the water’, or the wake that the ship leaves behind. Way has been used like that since at least the 17th century.
