I did a forum search to see if this word had been discussed before, only to find that the three previous occurrences of
actioned were in relation to the
Word List Suggestions page, where it is the label I put on one of the option buttons:
Which inevitably raises the question in my mind: is
actioned so bad after all? More specifically, does the word meet a need? What alternative label could I have used - "Implemented", "Dealt with", "Processed to completion"? "Actioned" seems to convey the meaning most succinctly and clearly.
In any case, the word seems to be used widely enough that it ought to be made common. The only reservation I have is that it seems to be used much less widely in the US than elsewhere (notwithstanding the complaints one can find online that it is yet another Americanism polluting the Queen's English).
The Global Web-based English Corpus shows this usage distribution among English-speaking countries:
It looks like Kiwis use the word about twenty times as much as Americans! But this is not the only data source that indicates the word is little used in the US. The Corpus of Contemporary American English, which has texts from 1990 to 2012, has only one instance of
actioned, and that is referring to "short-actioned rifles", so not the same sense as the business usage.
On the other hand, the British National Corpus, which goes up to 1993 only, has 26 instances of
actioned. Amusingly, many of these are from an undated document titled
New OED procedures documents. E.g. "...the forms should be actioned in ascending numerical order on the request serial number..."
The New York Times index reveals only one example of
actioned used in the sense of "took action on", and that was in a direct quote (from Secretary of State John Kerry). This makes me suspect that use of
action as a verb might be prohibited in the newspaper's style guide.
It's also noteworthy that most dictionaries do not have this meaning for
action, including, in their online manifestations at any rate, major US dictionaries such as
Merriam Webster,
American Heritage,
Random House and
Webster's New World College Dictionary. Yet the British
Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary includes
action as a verb meaning "to do something to deal with a particular problem or matter". This meaning is in other British dictionaries also.
It's easy enough to find examples of
actioned in US publications, but they are mostly specialized works, in management or technology.
So help me out, American forumites. How common is
actioned to you?
