Who invented “prepone”?
It looks like the most Indian word of all — and Oxford does label it Indian English, dating the modern formation to the 1970s (pre- + postpone). Shashi Tharoor once happily claimed a hand in popularising it — until an Oxford English Dictionary editor told him of a much older example: a 1913 letter to The New York Times, in which an American reader proposed “prepone” as the obviously missing opposite of “postpone”. Tharoor withdrew his claim and noted the word was also used at an Indian scientific meeting in 1952. The OED even records a 1549 use in an older sense, roughly “to set before”.
Moral: English already had bring forward. It just didn’t have anything this efficient. America proposed it; India adopted it; the rest of the world still gives it blank looks.
Tharoor in The Week · Oxford Learner’s · Merriam-Webster
“Revert” is not a mistake
Programmers flinch: revert means undo. But Oxford’s learner’s dictionary lists the reply sense outright, labelled “especially Indian English, rather formal”. It’s old commercial correspondence (“we shall revert to you on the matter”) that Britain retired and India kept. The genuinely risky bit is cross-team: “please revert the change” in a Git-using team can mean two very different things.
Oxford Learner’s — revert
“Do the needful”: a Victorian survivor
“The needful” — what is needed — is good 18th–19th-century British English; it also meant ready money (“the needful” for the rent). It faded in Britain and flourished in the Indian civil service, banks and, eventually, IT. The New York Times found it notable enough for an “On Language” column in 1987.
Grammarly · Know Your Meme (1987 NYT column)
How many speakers? (A correction)
The first version of this page said “a few hundred million”. That is not supported. India’s 2011 Census counted roughly 129 million people reporting English as a first, second or third language — about a quarter of a million as a mother tongue, about 83 million as a second language. Whatever the number today, it is one of the largest English-speaking populations on earth.
Multilingualism in India (Census tables) · Scroll.in — 2011 language census