God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen is an English traditional Christmas carol. It is in the Roxburghe Collection. It is one of the oldest extant carols, dated to the 16th century or earlier. The earliest known printed edition of the carol is in a broadsheet dated to c. 1760

The transitive use of the verb "rest" in the sense "to keep, cause to continue to remain" is typical of 16th to 17th century language (the phrase 'rest you merry' is recorded in the 1540s). The first line often is mis-punctuated as "God rest ye, merry gentlemen" because in contemporary language, rest has lost its use with a predicate adjective following and qualifying the object. The adjective merry in Early Modern English had a wider sense of "pleasant; bountiful, prosperous".