An unusual usage of verb "ship"
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I don't order things online, but sometimes others do so for me, and I'm always amused / bemused by wording such as this: "Your package will ship on 1/23/25". Normally, I would expect "your package will be shipped on 1/23/25" or "we will ship your package on 1/23/25". Now, however, "Your package will ship on 1/23/25" seems to have become almost standard.
Here's a real-life example, received this afternoon:
We have received and begun processing your gift selection. Your gift will ship via United Parcel Service, to the address you confirmed during the ordering process. We expect your gift to ship within 2 weeks.
This usage can also appear in the past tense: "your package shipped on 12/23/24" instead of "your package was shipped on 12/23/24".
The intransitive in such constructions seems peculiar / odd enough that customers have to ask the shipping companies (Fedex, UPS, USPS, Amazon) what it means, and the shipping companies in turn have prepared explanations about what happens when "a package will ship" and what happened when "a package (has) shipped".
Ship: past, present, and future; transitive and intransitive; active, pssive.
Selected readings
- "Grilling, staging, and landing" (5/5/11)
- "Past, present, and future" (12/4/14)
Y said,
January 18, 2025 @ 9:10 pm
Garden-variety anticausative: the door opened, the shoe dropped, etc.
Guy Plunkett III said,
January 18, 2025 @ 11:11 pm
Sorry, but I don’t find that usage at all unusual. I’m 71, so you can’t dismiss me as one of the youths.
John Chew said,
January 19, 2025 @ 12:12 am
I find the most humbling aspect of editing a dictionary of one's mother tongue is the incessant discovery of common usage that somehow never made it into one's own idiolect.
Michael Hanson said,
January 19, 2025 @ 12:50 am
I clicked on this fully expecting it to be the Extremely Online sense “to posit or hope for a romantic connection between” (see https://www.dictionary.com/browse/ship), which is definitely the most surprising verb sense of “ship” in my recent experience!
Jonathan Smith said,
January 19, 2025 @ 1:22 am
Contrarily I suspect OP is right that this is *relatively* new as in last couple decades and only very recently totally ordinary. Of course this *kind* of development is ordinary.
Marianne Hundt said,
January 19, 2025 @ 3:30 am
The construction *is* standard English, as are ‘Coffee is serving’, ‘The plane to New York is now boarding at gate 17’ and similar constructions. I prefer the term ‘mediopassive’ for them because the English mediopassive is different from anticausative and ergative (also used) constructions in other languages. Mediopassives are the result of long-term developments in English that have allowed for a broad range of atypical semantic roles in subject function (see also the flip-side phenomenon of secondary subject constructions like ‘the guitar broke a string’ or ‘the tent sleeps five’). These constructions aren’t ‘new’ at all. The patterns have been around for over a hundred years.
Philip Taylor said,
January 19, 2025 @ 4:57 am
"will launch", "will air", "will premiere", etc., have all impinged on my stream of consciousness over the last decade or so. I don't like any of them, but they do seem here to stay …
martin schwartz said,
January 19, 2025 @ 4:58 am
check out Old English scipian.
neminem said,
January 19, 2025 @ 10:53 am
I'm with Michael Hanson. I also expected this to be at least tangentially related to "shipping" two characters. My favorite silly thing about tvtropes – the number of trope names with puns about shipping (i.e. pushing for two characters to have a romantic interest in each other – including the meta-page, "Shipping Tropes"), but then, mixed in, a handful of pages that are *actually* about ships/shipping, like https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MileLongShip, which is actually about really large space-ships, not about character pairings.
In any case – I don't find this particular construction remotely awkward or peculiar, as a native (California) English speaker, and am somewhat surprised to hear that there are people who do.
coby said,
January 19, 2025 @ 12:05 pm
The labels on the cans of Campbell's chunky soup carry the slogan "soup that eats like a meal".
English needs these mediopassive verbs because it lacks the simple reflexive pronouns, genrally beginning with s- (z- in Dutch), that many other IE languages have, including all the Germanic ones except Frisian.
Tyro said,
January 19, 2025 @ 1:03 pm
As a middle aged someone who has never questioned this use of the word ship, I suspect the explanatory pages exist not to clarify the verb as much as to clarify where in the shipping process a package is at the points described–"package will ship" generally means "the label has been created but the parcel has not yet been picked up by the shipping company," while "package has shipped" means "it has been picked up by the shipping company." It is related more to who physically has it at that point in time than to what is meant by whatever conjugation of ship has been involved. People generally want to know that kind of thing so they know who to yell at if their package doesn't arrive as fast as they want it.
AntC said,
January 19, 2025 @ 1:55 pm
NZ must be real fuddy-duddies. My parcel's current status
Straightforward passive. No use of 'ship' in any form — because it's going by air?
Jonathan Smith said,
January 19, 2025 @ 2:11 pm
Clearly this kind of redeployment happens readily, but nonetheless individual cases emerge and become regular (or not) over time and might strike individual speakers as more or less cromulent. 'Ur stuff ships today' seems newish. In similar-in-this-respect Chinese, "shéi de yīfu fàng zhèr zhème jiǔ" (lit. 'Whose clothes put here so long?') is well-formed (and defies a prodrop interpretation), but in English, things just can't "put" places (I don't think).
JimG said,
January 19, 2025 @ 2:26 pm
U.S. military units and their personnel and equipment, or individual personnel, have been said to have shipped out (originally by sea transport) for at least a hundred years.
Reenlisting sailors (if their officers had found the sailors to be shipshape) were said to have shipped over, to serve another hitch.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 19, 2025 @ 6:49 pm
The difference between sailors and packages is that sailors are politely presumed to have some volition and will in the matter, despite whatever we may know of the long history of the press gang etc. The oddity (to some ears, not all) of this usage of "ship," I would respectfully suggest, is precisely in the presence of some level of implicature that the inanimate package has some volition/will in the matter of deciding where it's going. I assume those who don't find it odd just don't feel that implicature as strongly, rather than being folks who do attribute volition to the packages in question.
Four decades ago when I was an undergraduate linguistics major, my teacher Larry Horn (now emeritus, what with the passage of time) was very interested in "middle-voice" constructions in English like "this sausage practically cuts itself!" (if I'm remembering that example correctly through mem'ry's haze), and this usage of "ship" also feels akin to that.
Andreas Johansson said,
January 20, 2025 @ 5:07 am
Regarding recency, a quick search through my email confirms that Amazon was using the construction back in '06 (this appears to be the first notification of shipping I ever received from Amazon). At least one other company I ordered something from did the same earlier in the same year.
arthur said,
January 20, 2025 @ 9:33 am
Sounds like telegraph speak to me. Shipment-related communications were an early use case for telegraphs. Shippers were charged by the word, and inputting each word took longer than handwriting or modern keyboards. Replacing "was shipped" with "shipped" saved a word and a second or two.
cervantes said,
January 20, 2025 @ 1:56 pm
Standard English usage, probably for centuries. From Merriam-Webster:
Intransitive verb:
4
: to be sent for delivery
the order will ship soon
:
HS said,
January 22, 2025 @ 8:09 pm
As another data point (a middle-aged New Zealander), my instincts agree completely with those of Professor Mair on this. "Your package will ship" seems completely wrong to me, and like Professor Mair I would expect "Your package will be shipped". I have heard this new-fangled usage occasionally over the last couple of decades and it is no longer a complete surprise to me, but it still feels wrong and distinctly odd.
Not as odd, however, as "Your flight is now boarding at Gate 10", which seems completely bizarre to my ears, no matter how often I fly, and I very much doubt it will ever seem anything but bizarre to my ears no matter how much I may fly in the future. However, the passive "Your flight is now being boarded at Gate 10" also sounds wrong to my ears – because, I think, it lacks an agent and sounds too impersonal. It sounds like something you might hear on a news bulletin – "the hijacked plane is now being stormed by security forces". The unexpressed agent of "Your flight is now being boarded at gate 10" is passengers in general, whereas the intended recipient of the message is you (or other passengers like you) in particular and it is a quasi-instruction to proceed to Gate 10 if you are not already there (and so the intended message is really a message about the current status of the plane, not the fact that passengers may actually currently be walking onto it). To me the natural announcement would be "Your flight is now open [or available or ready] for boarding [by you] at Gate 10".
Of the other examples which have been mentioned by other commenters, "the door opened" and "the shoe dropped" seem perfectly normal to me, although it would take unusual circumstances for me to actually say "the shoe dropped" rather than "John (or whoever) dropped his shoe" (unless "the shoe dropped" is some kind of idiom like "the penny dropped" which I am unfamiliar with). "Coffee is serving" sounds completely bizarre to my ears and is certainly not "standard English" where I come from. "The guitar broke a string" is also extremely odd at the very least, while "the tent sleeps five" is completely normal. The difference is I think that "sleeps" in "the tent sleeps five" is essentially stative, whereas "broke" in "the guitar broke a string" is dynamic and would take an agent – "John broke the guitar string". If the intended message is about the current state of the guitar rather than who caused it to be in that state, the natural expression to me would be "the guitar has a broken string" or "one of the guitar strings is broken". If the message is intended to stress the breaking action rather than the current state of the guitar, but the agent is unknown or the speaker doesn't want to name him or her, the natural expression would be "the guitar string has been broken" or "somebody has broken the guitar string".
Regarding Phillip Taylor's examples, "will launch" sounds odd to me, whereas "will air" and "will premiere" sound fine. Again, I think the difference is that "air" and "premiere" seem essentially stative to me (though I don't think "stative" isn't really the right technical term here) whereas "launch" is dynamic and requires an agent, either explicitly expressed in the active "the BBC will launch the new program" or omitted in the passive "the new program will be launched [by the BBC]".
"Soup that eats like a meal" also sounds bizarre to my ears. At first I thought that maybe I could somehow interpret it or explain it along the lines of "the cake is baking", which is fine to me and coexists with "John is baking the cake", but again, I think the difference is that baking in "the cake is baking" is essentially stative whereas "eats" is dynamic and requires an agent. I would say "soup that can be eaten like a meal" or "soup that tastes like a meal' depending upon what the actual intended message is. Although advertising slogans are not normal expressions and the oddness of "soup that eats like a meal" may be a design feature, not a flaw.
""To ship out", as of troops, feels like a distinct phrasal verb to my ears, and therefore only tangentially related to the verb "to ship" and the issues related to it. "The troops shipped out to Guam" is completely unremarkable to my ears, but "the troops shipped to Guam" is impossible. And I have no problem with "the troops shipped out by train".
But on that point, using the verb "to ship" to refer to transporting goods by air sounds completely incongruous to my Kiwi ears – and I don't regard myself as a "fuddy-duddy". I do however regard myself as a competent speaker of New Zealand English, unlike a certain smug regular commenter here on Language Log.
Jonathan Smith said,
January 22, 2025 @ 8:51 pm
Earliest "mediopassive" ship I found readily is "Framework's developers came down with a bad case of selective memory when InfoWorld asked the company if the package shipped on time" (10/29/84). Earlier than I anticipated and definitely not exactly recent. Incidentally this could have begun in Am. Eng. and specifically in the software world…
Jonathan Smith said,
January 22, 2025 @ 8:59 pm
Come to find out Prof. Hundt's book contains ship examples that also pertain to software: "[…] release 4.1 of [some Windows software package] ships next week […]" (p. 144?). I guess from the 90's…
Philip Taylor said,
January 23, 2025 @ 7:22 am
Just to clarify, HS, my "will launch" referred (in my mind) to a forthcoming radio or television series or similar rather than to an ocean-going vessel …
J.W. Brewer said,
January 23, 2025 @ 8:24 am
@HS: it's not that hard to find evidence of musicians saying "a guitar string broke" or something similar, as if it's a natural thing to say, although they certainly also frequently say "[I/he/she] broke a guitar string." Lots of things break w/o obvious human agency, but I think what's going on here is that even if guitar strings don't typically break when no one has touched them, they do frequently break w/o actual user error – i.e. when you don't put on new strings often enough, an old string may have deteriorated to the point where it will break if plucked or strummed in a perfectly "normal" way that a well-functioning string is supposed to endure without breaking. Think of someone referring intransitively or mediopassively to a chair breaking when someone (not so heavy as to exceed the chair's designed capacity) sat down on it. Saying "he broke the chair" when there was no user error is, I dunno, arguably tendentious or something, because it seems to be assigning agency to the person who was sort of the unintentional catalyst who happened to trigger a flaw in the chair itself that was just waiting to be triggered. Arguably an "agent" but also arguably not.
HS said,
January 23, 2025 @ 6:46 pm
@Phillip Taylor yes, I understood that, which is why I gave an example about the BBC. But the same applies for other usages of "launch" as well, such as launching ships or rockets. "The rocket launched from Cape Canaveral [if it hasn't been renamed Cape Trump yet]" is impossible, or at least unnatural, for me since it implies agency on the part of the rocket – it has to be "The rocket was launched from Cape Trump [and landed in the Gulf of America]".
@J. W. Brewer "A guitar string broke" is fine with me, and I explicitly gave the example of "The guitar string has been broken" (where I used the perfective "has been" because I was thinking about the current state of the guitar, but whatever). The sentence that I was talking about and described as odd (to me) was "the guitar broke a string". This was given by Marianne Hundt as an example of "standard English" but it's not "standard English" for me. I find it odd and unnatural because for me it implies agency on the part of the guitar. "A guitar string broke" is fine and doesn't imply agency on the part of the guitar or the guitarist. (As you say, old strings can break essentially for no reason – I've had lots of guitar strings break on me.) Similarly, "the chair broke" is fine with me, but "the chair broke itself" or "the chair broke its leg" is odd because it implies agency on the part of the chair.
But back to guitar strings. While "The guitar broke a string" sounds odd to me, it doesn't sound nearly as odd as "your package will ship" or "your flight is boarding". I could just about imagine a guitarist halfway through the solo from, say, Freebird breaking a string (or suffering a broken string) and explaining to the audience that "the guitar broke a string" and I quite possibly wouldn't notice it, even though the natural expression for me would be "I've broken a guitar string" or "my guitar string has broken". And if it was B.B. King I could easily imagine him saying "Lucille has just broken one of her strings"….
J.W. Brewer said,
January 24, 2025 @ 12:07 pm
HS: I apologize for not reading your earlier examples as carefully as I should have. But maybe the difference is that "the guitar broke a string" is transitive, which forces agency and causation onto the guitar in a way that intransitive "the guitar string broke" does not. "The package will ship itself" (transitive) would IMHO be weirder than "the package will ship" (intransitive) for similar reasons.