Dot Wordsworth

Dot Wordsworth: How online shopping is changing English

The fight to the death between ‘shop’ and ‘store’

[Getty Images/iStockphoto] 
issue 11 January 2014

How do you play the lottery? The National Lottery website has a handy guide. Step No. 1 is: ‘Go into a store.’ But in my experience, lottery tickets are sold mostly in shops, along with confectionery and tobacco. You can, it is true, get them in Sainsbury’s, but I wouldn’t call that a store either, but a supermarket. Yet 2014 looks like the year of a fight to the death between shop and store.

Store is making aggressive gains through the phrase in store. It is the opposite of online (which has now become one word, not only as an attributive adjective (‘online gambling’) but also adverbially (‘he began to gamble online’).

Tesco now sees itself as having three ways of shopping: in store, online or mobile. By the last it does not mean ‘from a mobile shop’, but ‘by means of a mobile phone’ (with the help of an app, natch).

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