phrasal verbs - What preposition should be used with "cache"?


Which is most grammatical?




  • It's still cached to your phone.

  • It's still cached in your phone.

  • It's still cached on your phone.



I find myself gravitating towards "to" but I'm not sure - I feel like "cached" implies some kind of attachment.



Answer



To cache something means to store it away, so I think the most natural preposition is in. Cached on is also fairly common.


Cached to is very uncommon, but appears to becoming more popular in software contexts. I suspect this is because non-software caches usually require you to be close to them, but software caches are often remote so that the act of caching involves sending data to another server. Because your phone is not a remote server cached to is an unnatural choice.


You can see the relative uses of these prepositions with Google Ngrams.


A Google ngram chart showing significantly more usage of


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