Upcoming

I don’t know about you, but I’m a planner and find flying by the seat of my pants rather stressful. As such I like to take time thinking about events that are taking place soon and tasks that need to be done, which leads me nicely to today’s word: upcoming.

It feels to me that “upcoming” has appeared in everyday speech in more recent years; it’s not one I remember people using when I was growing up. At that time, you’d talk about “forthcoming” elections, for example, or the sporting events “coming up” in the next few weeks. So when did “upcoming” arrive in our conversations?

The word has been in use to mean literally coming up (OED’s example “Upcoming hunters on the hill appear.”) since 1835, but its use for something that is about to happen dates from 1959, which is actually much earlier than I’d expected. However, the OED clarifies this with the crucial words “chiefly US”, which would explain why I, as a Brit, felt that the prevalence of the word has increased more recently.

The British instances that the dictionary quotes are from the 1980s, so “upcoming” is a word that seemingly took a couple of decades or so to travel across the pond. So, if you’re writing fiction set in the 1960s or 70s, if you wish to avoid an anachronism, choosing between “upcoming” and another option will depend on whether you’re British or North American. I hope that this little post will help you make the appropriate choice in your upcoming writing.