Investigative Commentaries

Language & Evidence

Errored. A Word That Wasn't. Until It Was.

Commentary | Echo Truth Hub | February 2026

"The build errored on step 7."

Doodling and tinkering on Echo Truth Hub, I noticed AI writing "erred" where I expected "errored." The grammar enthusiast in me, radars on high alert using this new technology, went looking. I had never heard of the verb "err" as opposed to "errored." So I pulled the thread. And the thread, as threads tend to do, led somewhere rather unexpected.

Somewhere, a linguistics professor just spilled their Earl Grey.

Which is unfortunate, because they were about to be proven wrong.

The Language That Wouldn't Wait

Here is the thing about the English language: it has been alive for roughly a thousand years, and in that time it has survived Viking invasions, the French, Shakespeare's inexhaustible need to invent words, and the American marketing industry. It is, by any reasonable measure, indestructible. And it has never, not once, waited for anyone's permission to do exactly what it wanted.

Enter the humble word "error."

It arrived from Latin, errorem since you asked, settled comfortably into English as a noun, and proceeded to appear on approximately every screen, log file, and Post-it note in the civilized world. Its theoretical verb form, "err," meanwhile, retreated quietly into two frozen phrases, "to err is human" and "err on the side of caution," where it has been living undisturbed since roughly the reign of someone with a wig.

The Oxford English Dictionary, which has opinions about everything and has been forming them since 1857, records "err" as "now somewhat archaic in several senses." The OED does not use the word "archaic" lightly. This is essentially the linguistic equivalent of a polite English obituary.

And so, with "err" effectively retired, something had to fill the gap.

The Old Room I Stumbled Into

Here is where it gets interesting. And where I, a Dutchman with a grammar radar and too much curiosity, accidentally stumbled into a rather old room.

The OED has a separate entry for error, v., "error" functioning as a verb, with documented use going back to the 1820s, revised as recently as July 2023. Not American English. Not tech slang. Oxford English. The real thing, in the canonical dictionary, with a timestamp predating the telephone, the typewriter, and the first computer by a considerable margin.

The mechanism has a name: denominal verb formation. Linguists use it to describe the conversion of a noun directly into a verb, without changing the word itself. It is the most productive verb-creation process in English, responsible for more new verbs in the modern era than all prefixes and suffixes combined. "Texted." "Googled." "Impacted." Same process. Same logic. Completely rule-governed. Not laziness. Not slang. English doing what English has been doing since the 13th century.

A State, Not a Sin

There is also, if one pauses to appreciate it, a rather beautiful semantic logic at work. "The server erred" implies moral failure. It suggests the server owes someone an apology, perhaps a handwritten note and a small gift. "The server errored" is neutral. Clinical. Descriptive. A state, not a sin.

The Google Developer Documentation Style Guide, updated December 2025, explicitly advises against anthropomorphizing software when selecting verb forms in technical documentation. Even Google, it turns out, has feelings about this.

The gap existed. The language filled it. The OED ratified it. Centuries before Silicon Valley had the chance to take credit.

Language doesn't care about your style guide. It never has. It just keeps going, like a very old river that has seen considerably worse than you.

And occasionally, a Dutchman doodling on the internet finds it.