To Pre or Not to Pre: The Reason We Add ‘Pre’ Before So Many Words

In 2020, the Associated Press Stylebook finally waved a white flag in the war against preheat.

“Yes, it’s redundant,” the organization wrote on Facebook. “But overwhelmingly, we heard it’s what you want to use. It might be accurate to simply say that you heat your oven, rather than preheat it, but since recipes use preheat and your oven probably has a preheat setting, we updated {the stylebook} to reflect common use.”

Some commenters piped up in support of preheat, while others just scorned the term’s distant cousins—preexisting, prerecorded, preboard. “I’ll preheat the oven but I won’t preregister for events no matter what!” one person wrote. Another referenced a classic George Carlin bit about the prefix: “What does it mean to preboard, do you get on before you get on?”

The post shined a spotlight on our habit of slapping pre- before a word that doesn’t seem to need it. But many of these apparent redundancies actually aren’t redundant—and even when they are, it’s not for no reason.

1. Solving the Pre-quation
2. Pre-dundancy and Pre-suasion

Solving the Pre-quation

With some words, the prefix pre- does modify what comes directly after it. Prewar means “before the war,” for example, and premarital means “before marriage.” But countless pre- words follow a different equation. Consider the verb preview, which is rarely (if ever) condemned as redundant. Everyone grasps that you’re not viewing something before you view it—you’re viewing it before other people view it, or before the usual time to view it. (Or you’re viewing a small part of something before you view the whole thing.) In short, pre- is modifying an implied element that comes after the word that comes after it. Prewar is {pre + X}. Preview, on the other hand, is {X + pre + Y}.

Carlin’s definition of preboard actually acknowledges this Y element; he just feigned ignorance about what fills the blank for comedic effect. It doesn’t take much thought to realize what makes more sense: Preboarding isn’t getting on before you get on—it’s getting on before other people get on (or getting on before the usual time to get on). Similarly, preplanning a funeral isn’t planning it before you plan it: It’s planning it before the usual time to plan it. Even preprepare adheres to this logic: Prepreparing lunch means you’re preparing it before the usual time to prepare it (right before it’s eaten). It’s not the most elegant phrasing, but it’s clear that preprepare and prepare don’t mean the exact same thing.

(Sometimes the equation itself does depend on the context. As an adjective, preboarding can function as {pre + X}. If you say your favorite preboarding ritual is to drink a margarita in the airport Chili’s, you mean the ritual occurs before boarding.)

The Y often references the specific context surrounding the pre- term. Preexisting conditions typically involve insurance: They’re medical conditions that existed before you purchased a health insurance policy. Preheating typically involves cooking: You’re heating the oven before you put any food in it. Preordering typically involves release dates: You’re ordering an item before it’s been released.

In other words, we use pre- as shorthand for context that doesn’t need to be articulated because it’s automatically understood; it’s part of the definition of the pre- word. Even the most egregiously redundant pre- terms frequently serve this purpose. Presliced bread is just sliced bread, preinstalled software is just installed software, and prewashed lettuce is just washed lettuce. But in each case, pre- is emphasizing a silent but key part of the message: that the work was done prior to purchase.

Take, for example, this sentence from Gold Medal Bakery’s history of sliced bread: “In the early 20th century, pre-sliced bread was a novel, strange idea.” Readers understand that the strange idea was bread sliced before it hit shelves—not the concept of sliced bread in general. Dropping the pre- would make that less explicit. (As for whether to hyphenate each of these pre- terms is a whole other debate. We copied Merriam-Webster to keep it simple.)

Pre-dundancy and Pre-suasion

That’s not to say pre- is never redundant. It may be exactly that if you say the quiet part out loud, so to speak. I viewed the movie before letting my kids see it is grammatically tidier than I previewed the movie before letting my kids see it. The same goes for I ordered the book a month before its publication versus I preordered the book a month before its publication.

A pre- can be redundant because the context has already made itself obvious some other way. A retailer doesn’t need to label a loaf of bread “presliced.” The simple fact that it’s available for purchase spells out plainly that the slicing happened before then.

But the notion that all of these redundancies are wrong or bad presumes that the English language aspires to zero redundancies. It doesn’t. We rely on them constantly to draw attention to certain details and ensure we’re understood “even when the hearer or reader has missed part of {the message} through inattention or distraction,” as Merriam-Webster puts it.

Pre- often emphasizes convenience. “One buys a door which is ‘prehung’ (as well as ‘predrilled’ and possibly ‘preframed’ and ‘prefinished’) so that one does not have to perform any of these tasks,” University of Calgary linguistics professor Ronald H. Southerland wrote in a 1994 journal article on the topic. It can also be an effective euphemism: Preplan and preneed allow funeral homes and their customers to avoid constant talk of death. For cars, pre-owned avoids the “worn-out” connotation of used (which the auto industry has capitalized on by having strict quality requirements for certified pre-owned cars).

As Southerland pointed out, pre- is a persuasionary tactic—the speaker or writer is “attempting to influence the behavior and beliefs of members of various audiences by intentionally cloaking concepts in favorable, manipulative, or obfuscatory terms.” But while that may be true in commerce, government, and other institutional arenas, the prefix isn’t always so cunning. So go ahead and preheat your oven—even the Associated Press does.

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