A standard notice from the Instacart home-delivery service about a grocery order in progress from the Safeway supermarket:
You’ve still got time to shop
Add items until your shopper checks out
The intent is to convey the oldest intransitive phrasal verb check out: you can add items until your shopper has completed their search for items, informed the service of this, and left the store — 1b in the OED list below. But there are three other readings for check out, and the one that came to my twisted mind first was 4c ‘to die’. Evoking images of the fatal grocery order, which will never get delivered because the shopper dropped dead. (Presumably, the 4c reading had recently come by me in some other context, so it was somehow salient to me; my imagination is not normally so dark.)
The OED, revised 2025, on intransitive uses of phrasal check out:
1.b. intransitive. Originally U.S. To complete the procedure required in order to register one’s departure from a location or venue, esp. a hotel, at the end of a stay or visit. Also more generally: to leave, to depart. [1st cite 1908]
2.b. intransitive. Originally and chiefly U.S. Of a thing, person, fact, state of affairs, etc.: to be confirmed or verified as accurate or authentic; (also) to prove to be healthy or in an acceptable condition. [1st cite 1952]
4.a. intransitive. colloquial (originally and chiefly U.S.). To die. [1st cite 1921] Perhaps now regarded as a figurative use of sense 1b
4.b. intransitive. colloquial (originally U.S.). To lose enthusiasm, concentration, or interest; to be or become inattentive, unresponsive, or apathetic. Usually with reference to the past. [1st cite 1960]
2b is hard to contextualize in the world of grocery delivery, but 4b is a real possibility: your order might fail because the shopper just lost interest in it. That could happen. But in the real world it’s unlikely; shopper is a high-stress low-pay job, exacting work that someone lost in dreams and vagrant thoughts would not long survive in.
Meanwhile, the number of transitive uses of check out is just enormous; I wasted a good part of the morning working through this list in amazement. Check them out!
March 7, 2026 at 7:42 am |
4a reminds me of a phrase that I encountered in Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, where “peg out” is used as a colloquialism for “die”; I assume that (1) it comes from the process of being victorious in a cribbage game (which makes it a rather odd metaphor, actually), and (2) it was standard usage among some portion of the British population in the early 20th century.
March 7, 2026 at 8:19 am |
Puzzling. The OED entry for “peg” (revised in 2005) has intransitive “peg out” ‘die’ (slang, occurring in both Br and Am sources) from 1852 on, but without any speculation as to its source. (The OED’s cites aren’t helpful in this respect.)
Your cribbage idea is excellent, but other sources are imaginable — something to do with peglegs, for example, or pegs used in surveying and otherwise marking the boundaries of an area. Once again, we’d have to look at the textual and cultural contexts of a larger sampling of occurrences of the item. (The OED’s cites are merely a few representative examples of it.)
March 8, 2026 at 6:22 am
My reason for favoring the cribbage derivation is that the phrase “peg out” is standard cribbage jargon, whereas the other explanations you suggest don’t directly invite the “out” tag.
March 8, 2026 at 6:38 am
To RC: not so. Surveyors peg out areas — use pegs to mark the corners of a surveyed area. Other stories could be told for other cases.
You went for cribbage, because it’s familiar to you, but that would never have occurred to me (I know nothing about cribbage, had to look all of it up), because I had no idea that those things were called pegs.