
Do you say, “Could you please print-out that document for me?” or do you say, “Could you please print that document for me?” Why do we say ‘print-out’ rather than just ‘print’? This has been a puzzle to me for a while.
I was surprised to learn that the noun ‘print-out’, meaning an image reproduced by other means than chemical photographic development, first appears in 1899. The noun print-out comes from the verb phrase ‘to print out’, first seen in 1884. In brief, a print-out is what you print out.
Print-out, meaning a sheet of printed matter produced by a computer or other automatic apparatus, is from 1953.
The word print comes from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root
per-(4) meaning ‘to strike’.
Reference: Online Etymological Dictionary,
https://www.etymonline.com/
Published on March 28, 2022 19:29