The Etymology of 'Deadline'

The word 'deadline' has a popular etymology story around 19th century prison culture. The explanation of the meaning behind the word 'deadline' often goes something like this — as many etymologists and US dictionaries frequently cite it:

"The word deadline likely stems from 19th-century prison culture, where the word denoted a line within or around a prison that prisoners were not allowed to cross. And those who did so risked being shot and killed."

The popular theory is typically followed by a secondary story involving newsprint stories, which goes something like this:

.. and shortly thereafter, journalists and newsprint companies began using the word 'deadline' to describe the dates by which publications must be completed. Works not completed by the deadlines would not be printed and would 'die.'

So, how can we glean the frequency of the words "deadline," "dead line," and "dead-line", for the years 1850 to 1940? How can we empirically check this theory?

Well, if we look at Google Books "Ngram viewer," we can see for example that, indeed, around the 19th century, that the usage of the word 'deadline' jumps from zero to suddenly being charted in word frequency.

So, in the above graph, we can absolutely see that this fact is true. Usage of the word "deadline" spins up around these dates. Indeed, the data correlates closely to the timeframes of things happening in the 19th century involving war and prison culture. And also much later with the advent of newsprint companies, when there is a meteoric rise in the usage of the word.

The data seems to suggest that this was indeed some of the earliest usage of the word deadline. That this is an early record of a new word being coined, likely influenced by 19th century prison culture.

But on the other hand, this is somewhat deceptively compelling because it offers us only a simplified, partial perspective of language.

Perhaps it is true that the word deadline had not been used prior in recorded history. And that its usage began around the 19th century.

But the word "deadline" can also be further analyzed as a combination of two simpler loanwords or cognates: "dead" and "line." And both are words which have existed long before the 19th century.

In this case, they're likely cognates. As both words likely descend from the languages of our ancestors and have entymological connnections to common parent languages.

To dig deeper into our inquiry about the etymology, let's break it into its constituent parts. How much usage do we see sampling ngrams for only the word "dead," from the years 1850 to 1940?

We see a lot more data here. Sampling for the individual word 'dead' returns magnitudes greater word frequency. It hovers around from 0.0100% to 0.0120%.

Great. Alright, now what if we sample ngrams for just the word "line," in the same set of years, from 1850 to 1940?

The frequency of the word 'line' hovers around 0.0200% to 0.0300%, which is significantly higher than the combined word 'deadline.'

This examination of the words, in an independent way, serves to illustrate their extensive and longstanding usage in our language, predating the 19th century.

This is merely data to argue what we already intuitively know — that they are words sort of "built in" to the English language, so to speak. Their frequent use suggests they are part of a larger structure of our language.

Of course, this is due to evolutionary processes, the mass transmission of language across generations, population dynamics, and the influence of selection and network effects.

Indeed, many of the words we have today hone from a long evolutionary tree, often having their origins in proto-indo-european languages like Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic languages. And Dutch. And Swedish. And so on.

For example, in Proto-German, the word for "dead" is "daud" or "daudaz." And in modern German, it is "tot." Both of these words have somewhat similar phonetic sounds to the English word "dead."

But other proto-indo-european languages offer even more empirically compelling and ancient words for death - and specifically the word "dead."

For example, the Danish and Swedish words for "dead" involve variations of the word "död." This word is pronounced very closely to the way we say "dead" in English today.

And the English word "line?" It is also quite similar to its ancestral, proto-indo-european counterparts. In German, the word for "line" is "Linie." And in Dutch, Norwegian, and Swedish, it is "linje." But the word line goes back even further to Latin - where it was used as the word for flax, "Linum."

So, while the word "deadline" likely sprang from 19th century prison culture, a further empirical analysis may be made to say that the individual words themselves are likely of proto-indo-european descent, and hone from our very distant ancestors in another time.

This isn't to say that the etymology story surrounding the word "deadline" is false, but rather that its potential origins in 19th century prison culture and newsprint companies is merely part of a larger story about language.