For All Intents And Purpose

For All "Intents and Purposes" vs. "Intensive Purposes"

Published October 7, 2015

Both for all intents and purposes and for all intensive purposes are widely used to mean "for all practical purposes" or "virtually." But which one is correct? The standard idiom is for all intents and purposes, non for all intensive purposes, though if yous were to say these two forms out loud it might be difficult to tell the deviation between the two.

For all intensive purposes

The cause of the confusion is rooted in this phonetic similarity. For all intensive purposes is what is known equally an eggcorn, a label invented in the early 2000s by linguist Geoffrey Pullum to depict words or phrases that are misheard and consequently reform into a new word or phrase. Like, for example, hearing someone say "acorn" and thinking they said "eggcorn," which is how this phenomenon got its name. The difference is stark when written down, but when spoken, the ii words sound very much alike. Different mondegreens, eggcorns more often than not retain the aforementioned meaning every bit the original class, as in the instance of for all intensive purposes.

The nonstandard for all intensive purposes seems to have first appeared in the 1950s according to the Google Books Ngram Viewer, while a version of the standard idiom, "to all intents, constructions, and purposes," is cited in the OED as early as 1546. Historically, the dominant class of the idiom was to all intents and purposes, but over the by several decades that has gradually waned as the "for" form has increased in popularity.

Other eggcorns

The number of linguistic features that change due to a simple mishearing are numerous. The word apron, for instance, used to brainstorm with the alphabetic character n, but the audible divergence between "a napron" and "an apron" is and so infinitesimal that speakers removed the n entirely, assuming it was part of the word "an" rather than "napron." The give-and-take orange has a like story, equally do scads of other words and phrases across numerous other languages.

All in all, right and wrong can be a bit fuzzy in language, simply for now, for all intents and purposes, you should opt for the proper idiom over the eggcorn alternative. This is especially important in your writing, where the nonstandard for all intensive purposes cannot be misheard.