In recent days, London has experienced “The Queue,” in which people waited for up to 24 hours in order to pass by the body of Queen Elizabeth and pay their respects. And so it seems a good time to take another look at “queue,” meaning a line of people waiting for something.
As the spelling might suggest, it originated as a not one-off Frenchism. In French, “queue” means “tail,” and it was adapted by the English in the eighteenth century to mean a long plait of hair, that is, a pigtail. The French initiated the line-of-people meaning in the 1790s, and the first uses noted by the OED either italicized it as a foreign word or used it in a Gallic context, as in this quote from Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837): “That talent … of spontaneously standing in queue, distinguishes … the French People.”
It’s an interesting quote because, of course, we now think of the British has having a talent for standing spontaneously in queue.
In the last half of the nineteenth century, queue-as-line was used in both Britain and the United States. An example of the latter came from New York Representative James Brooks, speaking in Congress in 1864: “Last Monday week I saw a long queue ranged around the New York custom-house waiting turns to buy gold certificates at 65, while gold was selling at 75.” And it’s worth noting that “line” was used in Britain, as in this 1711 quote from Joseph Addison: “The Officers planting themselves in a Line on the left Hand of each Column.”
But in the twentieth century, the British took “queue” up in earnest.
And soon a verb form arrived: “queue up” by 1920, and the “up”-less form some thirty years later.
As the Ngram Viewer graph shows, American use of the noun started ticking up in the 1960s. In January 1960, William Zinsser wrote in the New York Times, about the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair, “Only on very rainy days was the queue [for the “Futurama” exhibit] a short one, but few tourists begrudged the hour they spent waiting.” “Queue” has appeared in the Times 5,385 times since then. Some of the increase in use on both sides of the Atlantic has to do with the use of “queue” in computer terminology, and more recently, inspired by Netflix, as a term for a sequence of movies or songs one plans to get to. (“What’s in your queue?”) Even more recently, some people have referred to a DJ “queueing up a record,” instead of the traditional term, cuing cueing it up.
Getting back to waiting in a queue, you can understand the word’s popularity in America, given the ambiguity-inducing multiple meanings of “line,” “line up”and “on line.” (New Yorkers wait on line, the rest of the country in line.) The only downside of “queue” is that it’s harder to spell. The gerund form actually has two versions, “queuing” and “queueing,” the former overtaking the latter in popularity in Britain in around 1990, according to Ngram Viewer. In any case, I knew a milestone had been passed about ten years ago, when I was at my local grocery store, and noticed that a sign indicating the “line” for checkout had been replaced by one indicating the “queue.”
Another milestone came in 2016, when President Barack Obama spoke against the U.K. leaving the European Union. That would portend badly for any U.S..-U.K. trade deals, he was quoted as saying: “I think it’s fair to say maybe some point down the line, but it’s not going to happen any time soon because our focus is on negotiating with the E.U. The U.K. is going to be at in the back of the queue.”
Leaving aside the policy aspect, British commentators jumped on the president’s use of “queue,” some suggesting he been “fed” it by Prime Minister David Cameron. However, writing in the Washington Post, Adam Taylor pointed out that Obama had uttered “queue” numerous times in the past, and was kind enough to cite this blog on the president’s use of such other Britishisms as “full stop,” “run to ground,” and “take a decision.”
notoneoffbritishisms.com 
The funeral also threw up a large number of Americans referring to Her Late Majesty’s coffin as a casket. Wikipedia (for what it’s worth) has it as a coy American euphemism in the vein of rooster replacing cock.
I am reminded how, when I was growing up, my parents were great fans of the writings of Frank B, Gilbreth, Jr., author of Cheaper by the Dozen. One of his other books was Inside Nantucket about he and his wife running a small hotel or guest house on Nantucket island. His wife also worked as a school teacher on the island and at one point she gave her class a poem which included the word “coffin”. None of the class knew the meaning of a container for the dead. But as Coffin is a popular surname on the island she wondered if she had broken some local rule about the word.
How fascinating that the spike in GB usage of ‘queue’ climbed as the second world war progressed and fell as the war ended. I surmise that would be due to rationing of goods.
‘Cuing’ is a new spelling for me. In the UK I have only ever seen ‘cueing’ in the context of records, videos, etc.
30/4/16 I pointed out – in this blog and citing a YouTube video (which has now been deleted) – that President Obama had said ‘…IN the back of the queue.’.
Thanks Nick. I will change the spelling to cueing. And I will incorporate your prepositional detective work.
I noticed that you mentioned the British standing “in queue”. I had never heard this until yesterday, when an American commentator on NPR mentioned people “standing in queue” to view the Queen’s “casket” – I assumed this was an awkward adaptation of “standing in line” to “queue” – but now you have done it too, so maybe this was not an NPR one-off. I have certainly never heard it before, on either side of the Atlantic
Actually, Tony, he was just following the usage of a 19th century author. See the line above the one you are citing.
You’re right – but does anyone in the UK say “standing in queue”, I wonder?
Nobody in the UK says “standing in queue”.
The problem with saying “nobody” says something is that it’s so easily refuted. Admittedly, they don’t say it very much. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=standing+in+queue%2Cstanding+in+a+queue&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-GB-2019&smoothing=3
Here are some examples: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22standing%20in%20queue%22&tbm=bks&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1994,cd_max:2019&lr=lang_en
That example is actually from an Indian book, and is replete with mis-spellings and other non-standard English expressions (as is the rest of the page): “Persons are standing in queue for filling form to apply smart cards. One person is forth from the both ends”.
the term “queue” has probably been aided in its uptake in North America by its prevalence as a technical term in computing. most people don’t know the word in that sense, of course, but I suspect enough people do to make a difference
Growing up in the second half of the century in the UK, I didn’t know a word for it other than ‘queue’, either as noun or verb. We didn’t have computers until the 1970s and then not in wide use. I take it that the graph counts instances of use but that wouldn’t mean that the word wasn’t already universally in use in Britain. It seems unlikely that there was a similar pattern of use in the USA, which might be read into the reference to an increase on both sides of the Atlantic. I heard the word ‘line’ when I visited America in the 1970s.
Like Sammy, I’d never heard of “line” in the sense of queue until I visited the US. And just as we say somebody is “in the queue” but never “in queue”, Americans say “standing in line” but never “standing in the line” (correct me if I’m wrong). Either way, with the recent lying-in-state I’m sure we can all agree that when it comes to queuing, we Brits are the world’s champions.
I just filled out an online form accepting an estimate for tree trimming work, and the email response was:
IT’S IN THE QUEUE
Hello! Your tree work order is in our scheduling queue! We will be in touch with a specific day […]
A notable example of American use of the word ‘queue’ is when Demi Lovato sings the word in the pop song ‘Instruction’(https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jaxjones/instruction.html). This is a collaboration with two British musicians though and the word may simply be used to rhyme with ‘do’ and ‘you’.
I’m reminded of how Sean Paul sings ‘shag’ in his hit song ‘Like Glue’ just because it rhymes with ‘brag’, even though the word isn’t widely used in Jamaica or the West Indies/Caribbean more generally.