If you type “without further adieu” into Google, you get over 4 million search results. Clearly, there are a lot of websites out there that use the phrase.
But they’re all wrong.
Okay, to be fair, the more popular ones are talking about why the phrase without further adieu is wrong, and they’re not actually using it wrongly. I mean, maybe they are; I didn’t take the time to comb through over 4 million pages.
It just seems unlikely that every search result is telling people why it’s wrong to use without further adieu.
Anyhow, now I sound like I’m keyword stuffing. So, let’s just get into it.
If you came here wondering if without further adieu is the correct phrase, then you should know the phrase you probably want is without further ado.
Outside this phrase—and perhaps also the title of Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing—we don’t really say ado much. And despite adieu also being a word we don’t use much, we probably hear it more than we do ado. Which is probably why people have substituted adieu for ado in this phrase.
Ado means something like excess fuss, concern, or bother, especially over trivialities.
Adieu, on the other hand, is a French word that means “goodbye”. Literally, it means “to God” (à Dieu). It has a more permanent feeling than another common French word for goodbye: au revoir, which basically means “until we see each other again” (revoir literally means “see again”).
Let’s look at the two options.
| Phrase | Meaning |
| without further ado | without further fussing |
| without further adieu | without further goodbyes |
Clearly, without further ado makes more sense. Although, if you’ve every tried saying goodbye to my father-in-law on the phone, you’d see that sometimes ado and adieu mean the same thing.
