grammaticality - Are both "from the offset" and "from the outset" correct?
I had always seen that phrase as "from the outset", but recently I saw somebody writing "from the offset" (meaning "from the beginning").
Dictionary.com claims that "offset" can be a synonym for "outset":
2) the start, beginning, or outset.
Would this mean that both of these phrases are correct? Do certain dialects prefer one over the other? US vs UK usage?
Answer
offset
can mean the start of something when referring to distances in space:
- competitors in short races on oval tracks start at
offset
s from the nominal starting line to account for the curvatures of their lanes - web page content might be rendered starting at a horizontal and vertical
offset
from the edge of the web browser, to allow room for ads - computer data is stored physically in computer memory starting at an
offset
from the begining of the available memory so as not to overwrite memory already in use by other programs
but not when referring to distances in time. And even when referring to space, from the offset
is not a standard idiom in the English language (at least not in Google ngrams). It does not make sense without context.
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