BBC Learning English
Keep Your English Up To Date
26th October 2010
Fit for Purpose
Are you fit for purpose? That s a question that seems to be being asked about nearly
everything and everyone these days, so you d better have your answer ready.
This rather prim phrase began life in the field of consumer protection law, characterizing a
manufactured product that does what it was designed to do. The implication for the consumer
is that if something isn t fit for purpose, you can take it back and get a refund or a
replacement.
The expression was occasionally used metaphorically in British English in the early 21st
century, but what really made a wider public aware of it here was the announcement in 2006
by John Reid, the newly appointed British Home Secretary, that his government department
was  not fit for purpose  meaning that it was no good at doing its job. That unprecedented
criticism hit the headlines, and opened the way for the use of  fit for purpose in an almost
unlimited range of applications.
A recent random search I did turned up buildings, budgets, educational courses, streetlights,
railway stations, hostels for the homeless, acts of parliaments, cattle sheds, soldiers, soil and
washbasins, all described as fit for purpose  or, more often than not, as not fit for purpose. So,
perhaps it s time for you to ask yourself,  Is my English fit for purpose?
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John Ayto is a lexicographer and a writer on words and language. He began his dictionary
career as one of the editors of the first edition of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary
English, and over the past twenty years he has produced a range of his own books on the
history and use of words, including the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins, the Oxford
Dictionary of Modern Slang and Twentieth-Century Words, a survey of the new words that
came into the English language during the twentieth century. He edited the 17th edition of
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and he has broadcast extensively on lexical matters.
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