Somewhere over the rainbow, that's where. And where to you go to weigh a whale? In England, but not America, you go to a whale-weigh station.

In yesterday's Spectator, a journalist (I forget who) wrote that a project of some kind was "under weigh". I thought this at best old fashioned if not peculiar, and I wondered if it was a hypercorrection or false etymology. But this was The Specator, home to Dot Wordsworth, and you might expect them to get these things right.

It turns out that "under way" is better, although "under weigh" has a respectable history. Michael Quinion:

[Q] From Paul Bondin: “An office colleague of mine insisted on writing “a project got under weigh” rather than “a project got under way”, whenever he described the start of some task. His explanation was that the expression had a maritime beginning, along the lines of weighing anchor to get a ship moving. I rather fancied the idea at the time, but I suspect that his story is pure fiction. The next time I use the expression, should I use weigh or way?”

[A] According to the best current style manuals, definitely way. But your colleague has the ghostly support of generations of writers. In fact, at one time, under weigh could be regarded as the standard spelling.

What happened was that the Dutch, who were European masters of the sea in the seventeenth century, gave us — among many other nautical expressions — the term onderweg, meaning “on the way”. This became naturalised as under way and is first recorded in English around 1740, specifically as a maritime term (its broader meanings didn’t appear until the following century). Some over-clever individuals connected with the sea almost immediately linked it erroneously with the phrase to weigh anchor. Weigh here is the same word as the one for finding out how heavy an object is. Both it and the anchor sense go back to the Old English verb, which could mean “raise up”. The link between the senses is the act of raising an object on scales.

It’s easy to find a myriad of examples of under weigh from the best English authors in the following two centuries, such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Captain Marryat, Washington Irving, Thomas Carlyle, Herman Melville, Lord Byron, and Charles Dickens (“There were the bad odours of the town, and the rain and the refuse in the kennels, and the faint lamps slung across the road, and the huge Diligence, and its mountain of luggage, and its six grey horses with their tails tied up, getting under weigh at the coach office.” — Little Dorrit).

It was still common as recently as the 1930s (“He felt her gaze upon him, all the same, as he stood with his back to her attending to the business of getting under weigh.” — The Happy Return by C S Forester, 1937) but weigh has dropped off almost to nothing now. This paralleled another change, starting around the same time, in which the two words began to be combined into a single adverb, underway (though many style manuals still recommend it be written as two words). It may be that the influence of other words ending in -way, especially anyway, encouraged the shift in spelling back to the original and in the process killed off a persistent misunderstanding.