In Webster's much larger and more detailed An American Dictionary of the English Language , however, extensive definitions for the word as a transitive verb, an intransitive verb, and a noun appear in entries under the spelling dispatch , and the entry for despatch reads as follows:. Conveniently, Webster addresses his rationale for this change of preference in the introduction to the American Dictionary :. But why change one vowel and not the other?
If we must follow the French, why not write despech , or depech? And why was this innovation limited to a single word? Why not carry the change through this whole class of words, and give us the benefit of uniformity? Is not disaster from the French desastre? Is not discharge from descharger? Is not disarm from desarmer? Is not disobey from desobeir? Is not disoblige from desobliger?
Is not disorder from desordre? The prefix dis is more properly English than de , though both are used with propriety. But dispatch was the established orthography ; why then disturb the practice? Why select a single word from the whole class, and introduce a change which creates uncertainty where none had existed for ages, without the smallest benefit to indemnify us for the perplexity and discordance occasioned by the innovation?
It is gratifying to observe the stern good sense of the English nation, presenting a firm resistance to such innovations. Blackstone, Paley, Coxe, Milner, Scott and Mitford, uniformly use the old and genuine orthography of instructor , visitor , sceptic and dispatch. Bold words from the same guy who, in the same dictionary, argued that systematize the actual word in use should be rendered as systemize for consistency with legalize , modernize , and civilize , and insisted that the "true spelling" of tongue is tung , of heinous is hainous , and of opaque is opake.
It is unclear to me when nineteenth-century British lexicographers began to turn away from despatch and toward dispatch , but by the time of Walter Skeat, A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language , the main entry for the word had returned to dispatch :. Dispatch, Despatch. Formerly spelt dis- , not des-. Henry Fowler, Modern English Usage voiced his support for dispatch in a brief entry:. Those "good reasons" appear in an introductory note to the entry for dispatch in The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary :.
Dispatch, despatch , v. The radical is the same as in It. Not related to F. The uniform English spelling from the first introduction of the word to the early part of the 19th c.
As noted earlier in this answer, although it is true that the authors that Johnson cites in his thirteen examples of prior use of despatch originally spelled the word dispatch , he changed the spelling in each instance in that entry, anyway to despatch. It is therefore highly implausible that the word "was somehow entered under des- " by some sort of mischance, without Johnson's clear intention to adopt that spelling. The spelling despatch seems to have taken hold in British English mainly on the strength of Samuel Johnson's use of the spelling in his highly influential Dictionary of the English Language That isn't to say that previous English writers never used the spelling.
He [the great Turk] heareth gladly messengers and embassadoures straungers, chyefely yf they brynge hym presentes. To whiche he answereth nothyng or yf he answere, he sayth onely, I haue hearde the, resorte to the Baches, and they shall despatche the, after this they se hym no more.
But EEBO also finds 59 matches for various forms of dyspatch from as early as a translation of Froissart's Chronicles and 11, matches for various forms of dispatch from at least as early as a translation of Froissart.
It thus seems clear that dispatch was far and away the mot common spelling of the word before Johnson intervened. If we may judge from Noah Webster's first dictionary from , U. English began with a preference for despatch , inherited from Johnson; but Webster began to reject that spelling in favor of dispatch in , and U.
By the end of the nineteenth century, British lexicographers—most prominently, Charles Murray of Oxford's New Dictionary project—had reappraised the alternatives and come out in favor of dispatch. Given the OED's endorsement of dispatch near the close of the nineteenth century, the lingering but diminishing preference for despatch in British publications over the course of most of the twentieth century may perhaps be best understood as a tribute to orthographic inertia.
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, however, dispatch has become more frequent than despatch in British publications overall. Despatch is still quite common in the UK. The manufacturing company I work for has a Despatch Team for example. In my view, in the UK despatch is traditionally used in preference to dispatch but that appears to be changing with younger people, who are more likely to use the American spelling. I always say dispatch. I would think that the spelling "despatch" is the more common one in the expression "Mentioned in despatches".
At least that is what is used in the Australian War Memorial site, hence possibly reflecting Australian and British spelling. Re name of George Stevenson's train mentioned by Dave Maunder above called "despatch", probably this has the connotation "fast" or "quickly", as in the expression "act with despatch", meaning "act quickly".
I do not think that you would say "act with dispatch". On the other hand I found four times as many 'despatch officers' on Australian google pages as 'dispatch officers'.
It all gets so complicated. If only those grammarians had left well enough alone. This article was originally posted on our Facebook page. Please sign in to post a comment. Not a member?
Join Macquarie Dictionary today! Flavour of the months. In Internet Explorer versions up to 8, things inside the canvas are inaccessible! Macquarie Dictionary Blog. Back to articles. To 'dispatch' or to 'despatch'? Which do you use? Other than this history of the word dispatch, we can also see that there is another noun that is known as a derivative of the word dispatch. It is dispatcher. Despatch is another spelling method for the word dispatch used by the British. Though by now the word dispatch has gained prominence and popularity over despatch there still are occasions where British use the spelling despatch instead of dispatch.
So whether you use the word despatch or dispatch, they both mean the same act of sending and no one can say that you have spelled it incorrectly. No American would ever use the spelling despatch though many Britons have started to make use of dispatch seeing its popularity all over the world.
Your email address will not be published. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published.
0コメント