United Kingdom

The most desirable thing on the Western Front was a bullet in the right place.

Blighty was British soldiers' mangling of Hindi and Urdu vilayati, meaning foreign, picked up in India and applied to Britain in France from about 1915. A Blighty one or Blighty wound meant a ticket out of the trenches, and troops sang about it openly. Inflicting one on yourself was a court-martial offense.

The word was modeled on Grexit, coined three months earlier for a departure that never happened.

Peter Wilding used Brexit in a Euractiv blog post titled Stumbling towards the Brexit on 15 May 2012, following Grexit, which Citigroup economists had coined in February 2012 for a possible Greek exit from the euro. Greece stayed in; the United Kingdom voted to leave in June 2016 and left in January 2020. The pattern has since produced dozens of imitations in political journalism.