Despatchĭespatch is a chiefly British English variant of dispatch, often used only in formal contexts like the name of the political despatch box in the House of Commons. prit., and, as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “by a fortuitous or ignorant running together of the two,” the word culprit was born. In the court records, this fairly long-winded phrase was often abbreviated just to cul.
Back when French was still the language of the law in England in the Middle Ages (a hangover from the days of the Norman Conquest), the phrase Culpable, prest d’averrer nostre bille-literally “guilty, ready to prove our case”-was apparently the stock reply given by the Clerk of the Crown whenever a defendant gave a plea of not guilty. There are several different accounts of the origin of culprit, but all of them seem to agree that the word was born out of a mistake. Meaning “to hasten” or “to complete something promptly,” the verb expediate is thought to have been invented by accident in the early 1600s when the adjective form of expedite, meaning “ready for action” or “alert,” was misspelled in an essay by the English politician Sir Edwin Sandys (it was later corrected). So despite it having its origins in an error, and irregardless of what you might think of it, there’s no denying irregardless is indeed a word-and it’s by no means alone. The word irregardless might not be to everyone’s taste, but there’s no denying that if you were to use it in a sentence, you’d be perfectly understood-and that’s more than enough evidence for it to have been accepted into many dictionaries (albeit flagged as non-standard or informal), including Oxford Dictionaries, Merriam-Webster, and even the hallowed Oxford English Dictionary, which has so far been able to trace it back as far as 1912.
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