[Ads-l] to ship

[Barretts Mail]

The English OLD (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ship <https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ship>) says: [no object] (of a product) be made available for purchase.

Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ship#Verb <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ship#Verb>) has (surely the first sentence is the middle voice): (transitive, intransitive) To release a product to vendors; to launch.
Our next issue ships early next year.
The developers had to ship the game two weeks late.

Facebook prototypes Unsend 6 months after Zuckerberg retracted messages
by Josh Constine
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/12/facebook-messenger-unsend/ <https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/12/facebook-messenger-unsend/>

—— 
Late last week, TechCrunch asked Facebook about its progress on Unsend ahead of the six month mark, and the company told us “Though we have nothing to announce today, we have previously confirmed that we intend to ship a feature like this and are still planning to do so.”
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“To ship” does not require a purchase, a vendor or a product. It simply means “release” or “make available for download/use”. It might be useful to confine this meaning to cyberspace, but it seems likely that there are cases where a company uses “to “ship” in an offer for something that can be downloaded or received in the mail (on a disk).

Benjamin Barrett
Formerly of Seattle, WA
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