What Is an Obituary?

The meaning of the word

“Obituary” comes from the Latin obitus — a going down, a departure, and by extension a death. English borrowed it through medieval Latin obituarius, the register a monastery kept of the deaths of its members so that each could be prayed for on the anniversary. That is still, in essence, what an obituary is: a record made so that a death is noticed and a life is remembered on the day it needs to be.

In everyday use the word carries two senses. Narrowly it means the published article itself — the piece of text in the paper. More loosely, people say “the obituary” to mean the whole act of announcing a death publicly, including the death notice and the funeral home’s online memorial page.

Obituary, death notice, eulogy, funeral notice

Four words get used interchangeably and mean four different things. Sorting them out usually answers the practical question underneath — which one you actually need to write, and what it will cost.

What an obituary contains — and what is truly required

Every guide gives a list of what to include, and the lists are long enough to be intimidating at the worst possible moment. So here is a measurement instead of a list. This site publishes 33 fill-in-the-blank obituary templates across 11 relationships, containing 562 bracketed blanks drawn from 152 distinct fields. Exactly 3 of those 152 fields appear in all 33 templates: Date, Time, Location — the date of the death and the time and place of the service. Meanwhile 109 of the fields appear in only a single template.

That distribution is the honest answer to “what has to be in an obituary.” The irreducible core is small: who died, when, and where the family will gather. Everything else — the maiden name, the regiment, the thirty-one years teaching third grade, the rose garden — is a choice you make about which life you are describing. If you have the core, you have an obituary. Anything you add past it is for the people who loved them.

In practice, most published obituaries carry these parts in this order:

1. The announcement — full name (with nickname in quotes and maiden name in parentheses), age, city, and date of death.
2. The life — birth date and place, parents, education, work, military service, faith community, and what they loved.
3. The family — those who survive them, then those who preceded them in death.
4. The services — visitation, funeral or memorial service, and burial, with times and full addresses.
5. The closing — memorial donation wishes, thanks to caregivers, and the funeral home handling arrangements.

The standard obituary format page walks through each of those five sections with the conventions editors expect for names, dates, and survivor lists.

Who writes an obituary, and when

Almost always a family member: a spouse, an adult child, a sibling. The funeral director will usually offer to submit it to the paper on your behalf and may hand you a blank form to fill in, but the writing is yours. There is no committee, no approval, and no standard you are being held to. Newspapers copy-edit for style and length; they do not judge the content.

The timing is the hard part. Papers generally need the text a day or two before the service so that people can read it in time to attend, which means the obituary is usually written in the first forty-eight hours after a death — the period when writing anything is hardest. That is the specific problem this site exists to make smaller.

How long is an obituary, and what does it cost

Length and cost are the same question, because most newspapers price obituaries by the line rather than charging a flat fee. Funeral home web pages, by contrast, are normally free and unlimited, which is why families often publish a condensed version in print and the full one online. We measured the obituaries published on this site and broke the numbers down by tone on how long an obituary should be, along with how to estimate your own line count before you submit.