On 19-May-09, at 12:43 PM, Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar wrote:

When I order books from amazon.com or amazon.co.uk, I sometimes receive
messages saying:

your order has shipped/has dispatched

Amazon.ca uses only shipped, not dispatched.

The OED has ship in a similar, but somewhat different sense from 1867: "It ships well, and is a very good peach."

In the first 100 hits for HAVE + SHIP in the Corpus of Current American English, the only relevant examples I see are:

-Popular Mechanics (2006) "there's a chance that your PC may have shipped with the hardware necessary to connect"

-The Houson Chronicle (2005) "since her debut album in 1990, more than 150 million Carey albums have shipped."

So, it does appear to be something of an innovation, and not particularly common.

Best,

Brett

-----------------------

Brett Reynolds

English Language Centre

Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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