Pilgrims were once simply strangers abroad

From “away from home” to a sacred destination

The word pilgrim traces back through French to Latin peregrinus, a word for someone from elsewhere—a foreigner, outsider, or person traveling away from home. Its older sense described a person’s relationship to the place they were in, not the reason for the journey. A traveler could be a peregrinus simply because the country was not theirs.

That broad idea of being abroad helped make the word apt for religious travel. A person who left home to visit a holy place was also, in a practical sense, a stranger crossing unfamiliar territory. Over time, Christian usage increasingly associated the journey with devotion, and the narrower religious meaning became the familiar one in English.

A change in what the word emphasizes

The shift is from where someone stands to why they travel. In the older sense, the defining feature was distance from home; in the later one, it was the spiritual purpose of the trip. The word’s history preserves both ideas: a pilgrim seeks a sacred destination, but the journey begins by becoming a stranger somewhere else.