passed » past

Chiefly in:   past away

Classification: English – questionable

Spotted in the wild:

  • The Vatican says Pope John Paul II after developing a high fever has past away. (link)

Death marking off the past…

Edited by Ben Zimmer: Marked questionable, for the same reasons discussed by Arnold Zwicky regarding past » passed:

Larry Horn noted [on the American Dialect Society mailing list], “this one is endemic, as is its mirror-image (“past” for “passed”).” And I added, “indeed. and it’s hard to tell whether these are eggcornic or just spelling errors. the semantics is close, and they were originally the same word. see MWDEU on ‘passed, past’.”

| link | entered by Sravana Reddy, 2005/07/31 |

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