Did You Mean Deprecated?

olaf@wundersolutions.com (Olaf Alders) — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 15:39:56 -0400

Occasionally I see a function or even an entire library marked as “depreciated”. If the code is something finance-related, that may make sense, but if this is not about finance, chances are the author meant to say “deprecated”.

These words might be referred to as “confusables”, “commonly confused words” or even “paronyms”. When you want to discourage something from being used, it’s “deprecated” and when an asset has lost value, it has “depreciated”. In some cases I guess a thing can be both deprecated and depreciated but in most cases just one of the words needs to be applied. No spell checker can help you here.

"Abandoned Old Rusty Car" by Alex Proimos is licensed under CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

#Deprecated

Deprecation is the discouragement of use of something human-made, such as a linguistic term, a proper name, a feature, design, functionality, piece of code, or practice. Typically a thing previously used is deprecated because it is—or is claimed or thought to be—inferior compared to other options now available.

— Deprecation, Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

#Depreciated

In accountancy, depreciation refers to two aspects of the same concept: first, an actual reduction in the fair value of an asset, such as the decrease in value of factory equipment each year as it is used and wears, and second, the allocation in accounting statements of the original cost of the assets to periods in which the assets are used.

— Depreciation, Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

#The evidence

Don’t believe me? Look for yourself. Note that some of these are actually correct uses of “depreciated”. They can’t easily be filtered out.

These libraries would be good targets for low-effort spelling fix pull requests, but the fact that many of them have been fully deprecated makes it a lot less likely that those changes would be merged and published.

When you’re writing software, know that it will likely one day be deprecated while the machine that you’re using to write it is currently becoming depreciated.

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NerdWords on Olaf Alders

Did You Mean Deprecated?

#Deprecated

#Depreciated

#The evidence