![]() In January 1960, William Zinsser wrote in the New York Times, about the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair, “Only on very rainy days was the queue a short one, but few tourists begrudged the hour they spent waiting.” “Queue” has appeared in the Times 5,385 times since then. An example of the latter came from New York Representative James Brooks, speaking in Congress in 1864: “Last Monday week I saw a long queue ranged around the New York custom-house waiting turns to buy gold certificates at 65, while gold was selling at 75.” And it’s worth noting that “line” was used in Britain, as in this 1711 quote from Joseph Addison: “The Officers planting themselves in a Line on the left Hand of each Column.”īut in the twentieth century, the British took “queue” up in earnest.Īnd soon a verb form arrived: “queue up” by 1920, and the “up”-less form some thirty years later.Īs the Ngram Viewer graph shows, American use of the noun started ticking up in the 1960s. ![]() ![]() In the last half of the nineteenth century, queue-as-line was used in both Britain and the United States. It’s an interesting quote because, of course, we now think of the British has having a talent for standing spontaneously in queue. The French initiated the line-of-people meaning in the 1790s, and the first uses noted by the OED either italicized it as a foreign word or used it in a Gallic context, as in this quote from Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837): “That talent … of spontaneously standing in queue, distinguishes … the French People.” In French, “queue” means “tail,” and it was adapted by the English in the eighteenth century to mean a long plait of hair, that is, a pigtail. And so it seems a good time to take another look at “queue,” meaning a line of people waiting for something.Īs the spelling might suggest, it originated as a not one-off Frenchism. In recent days, London has experienced “The Queue,” in which people waited for up to 24 hours in order to pass by the body of Queen Elizabeth and pay their respects.
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