Misuse of the word “revert”

By | December 2, 2008




I started seeing in a lot of emails recently the use
of the word “revert” in place of “get back to you” or “respond”. Just never made
any sense to me, this one I got today. “Will revert with numbers as soon as
I have the information”. 

I was starting
to think it was just me but I did some digging and I would like to point out
that sentences such as the one above are NOT grammatically correct. From what I
can gather this usage seems to have originated in India and funnily enough that
was the first place I saw it, it also seems it is fairly common in some parts
of Asia and Ireland. So what’s my point, not sure really, just pointing out
that this is not the correct use of the word revert, but as we all now, English
evolves at a rapid pace and before we know it this will start appearing in
dictionaries as correct usage of the word.

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