instate

The newsreader this morning hesitated over the item that talked about Victoria’s decision to instate restrictions. Obviously she was not familiar with the word instate, and neither were we.  I checked to see if it was perhaps a simple error but there are a number of instances.  Victoria instated a hard border with South Australia in November 2020 and is now instating COVIDSafe restrictions across metropolitan Melbourne.  The Sydney Morning Herald  reported in August 2020 that South Australia was prepared ‘to instate its tightest ever restrictions’. The number is small but it is clearly not a mistake.

 Re-instate is common enough, but instate? That doesn’t sound right, which is odd because why can you reinstate but not instate?  In this case it turns out that instate used to exist in British English with the meaning ‘to install someone in a particular office or position’.  That was in the early 1600s when instate was quickly followed by re-instate.  By the early 1800s instate was apparently obsolete, except in American English where it continued to function with its meaning restricted to having a person as object.  Somewhere in the 1900s the verb was extended to have non-personal objects like laws, restrictions, rulings, etc., and a slightly different meaning.  It is this use that seems to have appeared in the official statements of the Victorian Health Department, much to the surprise of us all.

 Google Ngram reveals that the pattern for instate in British English is high frequency in the early 1800s dropping to low frequency fifty years later and remaining low from then on.  In American English instate begins with high frequency at the beginning of the 1800s, dropping quickly to low frequency but surging again in the 1980s to 2010.  Perhaps this is a mild case of American English borrowing.