I've been curious for a while as to why wholesalers and builders merchants write eg. "bags of sand, 5 off" rather than "of".
My theory is that the "off" may be an instruction to remove the items from a stock list, rather than a persistent spelling mistake.
You answered your own question. Yay! ;-)
Yes, it's 5 off the total number in stock, or 5 off the top of the pile, etc
I became familiar with it when I was a apprentice fitter..long time ago. Lathe, operators, millers, etc would have a job sheet that would specify, eg. 6 off or 400 off, components or widgets.
Arthur
It is certainly not a spelling mistake. It is a well established way of denoting a quantity, which may date back to Middle English. From about 1400 of and off were alternative spellings of the same word.. It was only in the
16th century, most likely as printing formalised spelling, that the two words came to mean different things. The use of 'off' with numerals is probably a hangover of a usage from before 1600.Colin Bignell
In message , snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com writes
Do pay attention at the back
This was done to death a while ago
My grandfather, a foundryman, once told me that it comes from making a cast off the mould. That explanation ties in with the one found here:
Regards,
Thank you! Thought I'd got a bad case of deja vu, but I had seen it before, so that's OK.
That makes sense, alsom what would happen to Seven of Nine (star trek voyager) she'd be 7 off 9 totally different borg. :)
When you look that gorgeous it doesn't matter what you're called ( though I can't help wondering what the other eight look like ).
Q'uapla!
Greedy borger!
whisky-dave coughed up some electrons that declared:
More like 38 of DD.
mmmm
If SWMBO reads this via Google I'm dead.
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