Short answer:
actioned is rare because it's not so well-known in America.
Longer answer:
The rare classification of
actioned was actually queried by MK twice,
in 2015 and again
in 2018. So, Jacki, you're not the only one who doesn't check for previous discussion of a topic! Also, both of these are listed as open suggestions on the
Word List Suggestions page, which shows that I don't always check for previous discussions either.
The first time this was raised, I responded as follows:
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?
The two responses from American forumites were from rogue_mother and birdy. RM noted that
action is not recognized as a verb in either the Merriam-Webster or American Heritage dictionaries, probably the two best known dictionaries published in the US. (That is still the case, at least in their online dictionaries.) Nevertheless she said
actioned did not strike her as uncommon. Birdy said she didn't remember seeing
action as a verb.
Seeking to update my usage information I've now looked in another large corpus broken down by country, the News on the Web corpus. The pattern was very similar to that shown in the chart I posted in 2015: usage in Britain about 8 times as much as in the US; usage in Australia even more frequent, and in New Zealand more frequent still. In
Time and the
New York Times actioned seems to be used only in direct quotes from interviewees or, in one case in
Time, an article written by an Australian journalist.
So it seems the word
actioned has not caught on in America to anything like the extent it has elsewhere. Nevertheless many people decry it as an Americanism. A 2012
Daily Mail article, "Don't talk garbage!...or why American words are mangling our English":
American-English is a compound language — a language in kit form. Any word can perform any function... 'I've actioned it,'...
Or a commenter on the BBC website in 2000:
Things can not be "ovened", "fridged", "actioned" or even "trialled". Can we leave these Americanisms where they belong, over the other side of the Atlantic
Or the Indian magazine
Scroll in 2017:
Nouns as verbs seem more common in US English and are entering our usage: "impacted", "actioned" and other such noun-verbs, which make the purists squirm.
In conclusion, I'm not convinced that
actioned is commonly known in north America, so I think it should continue to be classed as rare, as per our definition.
Actioning is also rare, and will remain so.
