![]() The earliest example in the OED refers to a “dowbylle queue” (a forked or double tail). When the noun showed up in English in the 16th century, it meant a tail-like band of parchment used to seal a letter. In Old French, an animal’s tail was a cue. As it turns out, the British once used “line” for what they now call a “queue.”)Īs for the etymology, the use of the verb “queue” to mean line up is derived from the Anglo-Norman and Middle French term for a tail (spelled variously keu, kue, que, queue, and so on). (We wrote a post in 2014 on the use of “queue” in the UK and “line” in the US to mean a line of people. For now, though, “cue up” seems to be the preferred usage. One could argue, of course, that to prepare a recording to play at a specific time is similar to putting it in a waiting line or a queue of data, which may account for why both “cue up” and “queue up” appear in this sense in some edited publications. ![]() stored so as to be retrievable in a definite order, usually the order of insertion,” and the verb means “to place (data, tasks, etc.) in a queue.” In the computer sense, the OED says, the noun “queue” means “a list of data items, commands, etc. The verb can mean to arrange or form a queue (a waiting line), and to line up or wait in such a line, a usage that the Oxford English Dictionary describes as chiefly British. The word “queue” also has several senses today. In contemporary English, the verb “cue” has several meanings: (1) to use a cue in pool, billiards, or snooker (2) to prompt someone or something (3) to insert (usually “cue in”) something in a performance (4) to prepare (usually “cue up”) a recording to play. In a recent search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which compares terms in digitized books, “cue up the video” appeared, but not “queue up the video.” And in searches of the News on the Web corpus, a database of terms from online newspapers and magazines, “cue up the video” edged out “queue up the video,” though the results for both were scanty. “First, queue up the video you want to play and start a Zoom meeting” (from “How to Host a Virtual Watch Party,” Wired, July 4, 2020).“It’s why he could cue up the video and manage an uncomfortable smile” (from an article in the July 14, 2020, issue of Newsday on the Yankee pitcher Masahiro Tanaka’s recovery after getting hit in the head by a line drive).Longman describes “cue something up” as a phrasal verb meaning “to make a record, CD, DVD etc be exactly in the position you want it to be in, so that you can play something immediately when you are ready.” Example: “The DVD player’s cued up and ready to go!” And Webster’s New World defines “cue” as “to ready (a recording) to play back from a certain point: often with up.”īut, as we said above, both spellings are seen in the media, as in these examples: Lexico, the former Oxford Dictionaries Online, says “cue” can mean to “set a piece of audio or video equipment in readiness to play (a particular part of the recorded material).” The dictionary has this example: “there was a pause while she cued up the next tape.” Of the 10 standard dictionaries we regularly consult, four of them include this sense of “cue up,” while none mention a similar use of “queue up.”Īmerican Heritage says one meaning of the verb “cue” is “to position (an audio or video recording) in readiness for playing.” It gives this example: “cue up a record on the turntable.” ![]() 4, 1996).Īs we’ll show later, this use of “cue up” is at least as old as the 1970s.
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