Friday, February 15, 2019

word meaning - Is this definition of "preshipped" incorrect?



Looking at the number of tweets and followers, I had subscribed to a twitter account of 'Vocabulary Builder'. It tweets about the words and I try to learn from it.


The word it posted today is...



Preshipped (noun) - Large vessel for navigating in water




Though the word does not seem to be popular, Collin's definition is all different for that word (And I agree with this) -



preshipped (adjective) - relating to items sent ahead of time



Kindly clarify this to me.



Answer



It looks rather like that Twitter feed is using Dictionary.com as it's source (with some adjustment to the actual text).


Sadly, Dictionary.com 'auto-finds' the nearest word it knows to that which you type.


If you type preshipped you get the definition for ship. The first entry for ship is for the noun ship (as you'd expect) and the wording is almost exactly the same.


I checked a couple of others near preshipped. Some of them have slightly altered wording but it's clear dictionary.com is the source.




  • Quasinormal gives the definition for normal

  • Halfaquiescent gives the definition for aquiescent

  • Digressionary gives the definition for digression



All in all I'd suggest that you should not trust the definition from 'Vocabulary Builder' until after checking the definition at Dictionary.com, unless you want your vocabulary to be large, but substantially wrong. I guess it is an OK source for new words, it's just that the definitions might not be correct.


Dictionary.com definitions are trustworthy, the definitions 'Vocabularly Builder' chooses out of the choice given at Dictionary.com for a word are most certainly not trustworthy.



Edit (for preshipped)



As noted in the question, preshipped is defined in the Collins dictionary but that appears to be the only on-line definition of the word. Much of OED2 and OED on-line is exactly as it was in OED1 and has not been updated since OED1. As a related example, OED2 has only a single mention of airfreight and that is in one of it's examples of usage for the word freight. The definition of airfreight can be found in many on-line dictionaries.


The first mention of preshipped that I can find in Google Books is from 1943 (there are earlier references suggested but they are incorrect) in a report from the US Armed Forces regarding preshipment of materials.


There are a few mentions in a logistics report, United States Army in World War II Global Logistics and Strategy, Robert W. Coakley and these seem to suggest that the word is being used to mean shipped before a need [for the equipment] has been properly identified, based on an assumption that there might/will be a need in the future.


When preshipped was in it's infancy, early 1940's, it was used in a military sense particularly by the US Armed Forces (and US Congress when discussing it). There's a nice mention of it here in the Department of the Army technical manual Operators, Organizational, Direct Support, General Support and Depot Maintenance Manual Including Repair Parts and Special Tool Lists: Teletypewriter Terminal AN/MGC-22,, United States. Dept. of the Army where there is a distinction made between preshipped and requisitioned.


Late 20th and early 21st century examples are not limited to military use, although that is still the major usage; modern usage covers software distribution, personal belongings being shipped to a destination before the owner, meat samples preshipped before the full delivery etc. etc.


The most recent usage I could find harks back to the 1943 usage of ship something in the expectation that it will be needed in the future and describes (the on-line retailer) Amazon's new anticipatory shipping technique; you can find it in this article at TechCrunch.com.


Summary : preshipped appears to be a term used initially in the field of US Armed Forces logistics since the early 1940's. It now appears to be gaining more widespread use. Given time, it is bound to appear in more dictionaries as they are updated.


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