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A thing, practice, or idea that has faded from use may be said to be ‘obsolete’. It is outdated, no longer current. Obsolete itself derives from the Latin adjective obsoletus, meaning ‘to become old or worn out’. Obsolete is constantly applied in the military realm to weapons and tactics, both of which can be supplanted rapidly by something newer or more effective.
An early general usage was in the English poet Edmund Spenser’s 1579 The Shepheardes Calender, in which it is written that ‘such olde and obsolete wordes are most used of country folke’. An application in a military context appeared in the Pall Mall Budget of 15 August 1884: ‘On the Pacific station… [Britain has] one obsolete ironclad, the Swiftsure.’
Another military usage came in 1906, the year that saw the debut of HMS Dreadnought, the Royal Navy’s revolutionary high-speed battleship equipped with a main armament of all-big cannons. That February, The Bystander, a weekly publication, quoted a naval officer who advised that: ‘On the day that the battleship Dreadnought hoists the pennant, all the navies of the world will be rendered obsolete.’
Subsequent battleships built according to a similar pattern were henceforth labelled ‘dreadnoughts’ after her. So profound, in fact, was Dreadnought’s influence on naval design that earlier battleships constructed according to superseded notions were retroactively called ‘pre-dreadnoughts’.
Obsolete may also be applied to specific models of weapons or tanks and warplanes. The Sherman tank and Spitfire fighter of Second World War fame are now utterly obsolete, for example. Furthermore, entire technologies can become obsolete, as when steam power replaced sail power in warships over several decades during the 19th century.
A similar, but speedier, transition occurred in just a few short years after World War II, when jet fighters displaced piston-engine warplanes in frontline service.
