Of the digital entries transcribed so far in an online version of the dictionary, ‘ dispatch‘ occurs 8 times to a singular occurrence of ‘ despatch‘ when used to define other words. Prior to that, spelling was hardly rigidly enforced. Allegedly, the variant spelling arose due to a printing error in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which brought both spellings into wider usage by adding legitimacy to the des- spelling. I would place the fashion as late 18th century though, due to the influence of the lexophile, Dr Samuel Johnson. ‘Despatch’ seems to have become fashionable in the late Victorian period.” ‘Dispatch’ is by far the more common spelling, uniquely so in the 16th, 17th, and 18th-century examples.
A historic anomaly, perhaps? What not “ an historic anomaly” – well that is another grammar, style, and usage question entirely! Dispatch and Despatch according to the DictionaryĪ user on the StackExchange English Language & Usage site writes: “The OED lists both spellings with equal status. I’ve not been able to prove a consistent early provenance of Despatch over Dispatch Box, but Despatch Box seems to have stuck in the British Parliament now. The specific use of the phrase “ Despatch Box” when referring to the UK and Australian Parliamentary speaking lecturn lectern/rest and documents boxes (though now containing a Bible used for oaths) dates from the 17th century in Britain (although the current boxes were gifts from New Zealand after the existing ones were destroyed by a German bomb in 1941) and as a gift from King George V to Australia in 1927. So says the usually excellent Grammarist, anyway – the comments on their post are worth reading alone for how the discussion got into whether ‘ despatch‘ was a noun or verb in some instances and for the commendable digression onto “a box of frogs and a shipment of drugs” whilst on “whacky baccy”! But I was not convinced. My initial inquiry – or rather enquiry in British English to be ever so slightly pedantic, led me to believe that ‘ despatch‘ was just a less common variation of ‘ dispatch‘ and more typically British, in about a third of its millions of uses. So I went on an authoritative and exhaustive examination of the facts, i.e., I googled it. My issue is that ‘ despatch‘ just looks and sounds wrong, compared to ( or with?) the more traditional, and so I thought, correct, ‘ dispatch‘.
DISPATCH DEFINITION PROFESSIONAL
This brings me to my professional pedant‘s persnicketiness (a much better word than pernickety, the extra ‘s’ in there, added around 1915, sounds so much more sinister and sneaky). They “eat, sleep and breathe the internet”, but I think they were ‘ sleeping‘ during their proofreading. Their tagline is “The Benchmark For Online Business” and yet we spotted half a dozen errors on a single page alone. Perhaps they chose Despatch Bay over Dispatch Bay because the latter was already in use, by The Dispatch Bay, a UK-to-Pakistan specific courier business:Īlthough, I doubt they give it much thought, given how badly punctuated the website of the brand-owning company, The SaleGroup, is. It was for yet another rival parcel delivery service or postal services aggregator/comparison site – competition is certainly keeping the prices down, especially of sending high heeled shoes through the post, the Royal Mail has recently specifically discounted a shoe box sized parcel! The ad in question was for, named to sound like eBay rather than PirateBay one assumes – since the latter might suggest the stealing of goods rather than their dispatch, and the alternate meaning of dispatch – “to kill with quick efficiency” ( Merriam-Webster, attested since the 1520s). Whilst browsing an online auction site, okay so it was eBay, I spotted an ad that irked me.
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