I got a note last week from a correspondent asking me about the word hithertofore, and whether or not it was a ‘proper word’. I have to admit that at first glance I was very surprised, because of course it was a perfectly good word, and one whose meaning I knew well. But when the correspondent said that she’d looked around and hadn’t found it, I looked at it again and realized that of course it wasn’t a word. Or was it?
English has two words with a distinctly archaic flavour that mean ‘up to the present time’, hitherto and heretofore. These synonyms also start with the same letter, are compounds containing to, and to top it all off, hither and here are also synonyms, so it’s not even semantically odd. Neither word is especially common, and as you can see from this Ngram, hitherto and heretofore are really quite rare and becoming rarer. It’s hardly surprising, then, that some speakers and readers might blend these two. Whether we think of it as adding -fore to hitherto, or substituting hither for here in heretofore, doesn’t much matter, as the result is the same, hithertofore.
What should perhaps be more surprising is that hithertofore hasn’t hithertofore been included in any dictionary, not even with a usage note. It’s not hard to find in use in printed books; Google Books claims 67,500 works containing it (although that number is probably inaccurate) in lots of different genres. There are plenty of words in big unabridged dictionaries that are far less common than that. I’ve found it going back at least as far as 1708, and I didn’t have to look very hard. While it seems at a glance that a higher than average proportion of these works are authored by non-native English speakers, I also would argue that one has to be relatively fluent to even make such an error, conflating two already-unusual words.
Note, though, that its Ngram, rather than slowly declining from the 19th century until today like those of its two constituents, shows it to be largely a product of the mid-20th century, peaking around 1970. This suggests, firstly, that perhaps it was at its most popular when its two constituents had declined enough in frequency that they had fallen out of regular use (and were thus prone to confusion), but were still common enough to be intermixed. It hit its sweet spot half a century ago, but now the two well-accepted words themselves are falling out of use in favour of previously or other terms, so hithertofore may actually have lost its chance to become another widely used variant (even at its most popular, it was less than 1% as frequent as heretofore). I still think it’s a neat example of the way that memory, meaning, and phonology can lead to the appearance of nearly-invisible blends, and given that it is a relatively common error, it could probably use some lexicographical attention.
Glossographia 
I still long for the good ol’ days of yet, yet at other times I long for the good ol’ days of still. But I have chronic hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. Reminds me of an old riddle: What do you call a bunch of legalese chained together at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.
Not sure about this, but I have an inclination that ‘hither’ and ‘thither’ are not exact synonyms of ‘here’ and ‘there’ but rather have some implication of motion, as in, “Come hither!” or, “Get thee thither!”
Is this correct, or am I just making it up, and does anyone care anymore about correct usage of such museum pieces?
I grant that ‘hither’ and ‘thither’ are not perfect synonyms of ‘here’ and ‘there’ for the reason you mention – ‘hither’ and ‘thither’ require motion to or from some place (or through metaphorical extension, some time), whereas with ‘here’ and ‘there’ motion is optional. So there are examples where you can’t just replace ‘here’ with ‘hither’: for instance, ‘I’m going to stay hither’ is ungrammatical. However, I can’t think of any instance where you can’t replace ‘hither’ with ‘here’. So the question, I suppose, is whether, in ‘heretofore’ and ‘theretofore’, ‘here’ and ‘there’ are understood as static or as representing motion. And, of course, the fact that we are having this discussion at all suggests that the distinction is largely lost among English speakers (most of whom never use ‘hither’ or ‘thither’ except in idiomatic phrases like ‘come hither’ and ‘hither and thither’.
Fair comment. I think we should stick up for ‘hither and thither’ as almost their last refuge!
Like ‘kith and kin’ kin on its own is rare enough these days – but does anyone know what ‘kith’ is anymore? We might hear someone these days saying, “Friends, relatives, loved ones…” but why not, “Kith, kin, loved ones…”?
Never mind – so it goes – I wonder how long it will be before ‘google’ becomes an archaism!
Bartiddu, OED confirms, indeedy, the implication of motion, a hithering to this-here place or a thithering to that-there place, so Jingo-by I think you’ve got it.
Etymologically, hi+der = hither, tha + der = thather > thither. and best (not) to forget yon + der = yonder. But for some strange reason, for me there’s no implication of motion with ‘yonder’ even though its aboutcoming was the same. There is no sense of yondering to yon-there place. And there’s also no attestation of yonderfore, yondertofore, yonderby, &c.
Poor, poor yonder, that-there inveterate loner. No to, no fore, no by would hook up with him in the good ol’ yore-days. Always a groomsman, never the groom. The most museum-piece-y of the lot.
In a staff meeting, a younger member mentioned that I had used wander and yonder in the same sentence. I told him that I couldn’t help it, I was from the country. He said, “No, you’re old!” Note: I just got a spell check indication on “yonder.”
Here’s the practical question, for me in my writing, based on the motion problem: does ‘hither,’ with its sense of, moving toward here, _add_ anything to what I’m trying to say about ‘what happened in the past up until now’?
Heretofore (according to the ’93 NS OED) can be read as just, time past, formerly: the past. But literally, it would mean, from now back to previous–so the motion is heading backwards.
If hither includes the sense of motion towards here, while ‘fore’ means ‘the past’, then putting those two parts of the word together, there’s a sense of the motion from the past coming up to me. Right? But this is confused, because I’m just trying to say I’m looking from now, where I am, all the way back into former times, instead of the past rushing up to me.
Ok, I’ve just convinced myself not to use hithertofore, since the motions are going in the opposite directions.
Unless someone can make an account for me why this double motion would be good?
‘Hither’ has motion to an endpoint but ‘here’ only has endpoint. With ‘hithertofore’ it seems one must have progression, what was happening in the past up to now, versus the punctual ‘heretofore’, what happened in the past before now.
Also, if the hithering didn’t lead to now, I’m wondering whether the hithering in the past would be heretofore. Is it enough for the hithering to be ‘toward now’ or must it be ‘to now’.
‘From now back to previous’ would require some help from H. G. Wells or Doctor Who. But even with their help, we’d be looking at theretofore or *thithertofore if the endpoint is in the past, not here, not now.
But even if Wells and Who zigged and zagged us from the distant past and distant future to the present, all of that zigging and zagging would be hithertofore, unless we’re only talking about the destinations visited during the zigging and zagging, which would be heretofore non-present non-here times and places visited.
Now I’m thinking I have it all backward. I probably do.
Wanting to be sure of my usage, I searched Merriam-Webster’s and Dictionary.com to no avail before discovering your post. I don’t really want to dispute your contention that ‘hithertofore’ is a non-word. However, I will say this, my intended usage was not to indicate something that took place up until the present time but, rather, up to some point in the past. My reasoning was that ‘hitherto’ would mean ‘up to that point’ and the addition of ‘-fore’ would indicate that the point in time in question occurred in the past.
Here is my example:
“There’s a scene in the film where Bird is telling trumpet player Red Rodney of his breakthrough, precisely when the epiphany occurred that allowed him to play the music in the manner that, though begging for expression, had hithertofore remained bottled up inside of him.”
…
LOL
The funny thing is that, now that I’m looking at it pasted here, I see that my desire to avoid the much less problematic alternative, ‘previously’, was motivated by my erroneous belief that I had already used it in the sentence. Obviously I had not. The word I had used was ‘precisely’.
No harm done. The academic exercise has been rewarding and it has brought me to the conclusion that ‘hithertofore’ should be declared a legitimate word, based on my definition.