DISPATCH DEFINITION FULL

Specifically, murder specifically implies stealth and motive and premeditation and therefore full moral responsibility.Ĭonvicted of murdering a rival When is slay a more appropriate choice than dispatch? The words murder and dispatch are synonyms, but do differ in nuance. However, kill merely states the fact of death caused by an agency in any manner.įrost killed the plants When is it sensible to use murder instead of dispatch? In some situations, the words kill and dispatch are roughly equivalent. The synonyms execute and dispatch are sometimes interchangeable, but execute stresses putting to death as a legal penalty.Įxecuted by lethal gas Where would kill be a reasonable alternative to dispatch? Terrorists assassinated the Senator When could execute be used to replace dispatch? While the synonyms assassinate and dispatch are close in meaning, assassinate applies to deliberate killing openly or secretly often for political motives. While all these words mean 'to deprive of life,' dispatch stresses quickness and directness in putting to death.ĭispatched the sentry with one bullet When might assassinate be a better fit than dispatch? Some common synonyms of dispatch are assassinate, execute, kill, murder, and slay. This article was originally posted on our Facebook page.Frequently Asked Questions About dispatch How is the word dispatch distinct from other similar verbs? Want some help with other common confusables? Check out our other comparison blogs If only those grammarians had left well enough alone. On the other hand I found four times as many 'despatch officers' on Australian google pages as 'dispatch officers'. I could find no instances of 'with despatch' but a number of 'with dispatch'. Of course phrases and idioms and compounds get set along the way in one form or another.

And so we start inventing differences between them. Later on scholars tried to take it back to the Latin in the quest for etymological purity and so we end up with en- and in. The starting point here is the Latin prefix in- with the verb quaerere to ask, but as it passed through Old French it became en- and this is how it arrived in Middle English. Compare an inquiry conducted by a government with an enquiry that I might make at the local shop. But this is something that we invent after we have arrived at the two forms. So dispatch becomes the noun meaning 'speed and energy' and despatch becomes the verb meaning 'to send off with speed and energy'. It is common for us, when we have two words for the same thing, to make one mean something slightly different from the other. So the idea that there is a prefix de- followed by the root 'spatch' doesn't work. The Italian word breaks down into a prefix dis- meaning 'away from' very literally, and pacciare to impede or delay. Macquarie has opted for dispatch since there is no reason to doubt that this always was the form in English, but has added despatch as a legitimate variant now at the end of the entry, since there are now many people, many teachers even, who prefer the form despatch. From that moment on English has wavered over the correct spelling of this word. Since he himself used dispatch in his own writing and since all his sources that he used for the dictionary had the form dispatch, the theory is that this was a typographical error. The dis- spelling was the norm in English until Dr Johnson wrote his dictionary in 1755 and included the word as despatch. The word comes into English in the early 1500s from Italian dispacciare, 'to send off with speed', although there were forms of the word in Spanish and Portuguese with des. Any unfortunate student who produced dispatch in a spelling bee was penalised. To dispatch or to despatch: that was the question from a dictionary user who had been taught at school that despatch was correct and dispatch was incorrect.

Dispatch definition