As the computer industry continues to evolve into more of a cloud centric model, I want to officially express my concern about the confusion between the words premise and premises.
It is my understanding that a premise (singular) is a set of one or more declarative sentences (or propositions) in a logical argument. Whereas a premises (also singular, while being the plural of premise) is the land and buildings together considered as a property.
The word, premises, in this latter context, is always used in the plural, but is singular in construction. For example, a single house or a single other piece of property is premises, not a premise, although the word, premises, is plural in form as in, "The server is located on the customer’s premises" and never "The server is located on the customer’s premise.”
This is a crazy construction in English where one word has two distinct meanings. I believe we should be referring to “on premises” solutions and not “on premise” solutions.
I have no problem with the shortened moniker of “on-prem,” but “on premise” is just plain wrong unless you are referring a premise of operation. For example, “We bought a hosted solution on the premise that it would be a lower total cost of ownership.”
It seems I am not alone as I found this reference written in 2009.
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I completely agree. It seems that you should have told Sage this *before* they created all the Summit literature and powerpoint slides.
I tried, but without much success.
OMG you are so right. Sage needs a grammarian on staff.
Merilyn, it is not just Sage, this is an industry phenomenon, and it is making me nuts.
Ed – I’ve already tweeted this but will post here as well.
It’s a new usage for an existing word like “tweet” or “cloud”. Sure, in this case, there was already a perfectly acceptable phrase that means the same thing (“on premises”) but … some genius decided to drop that extra “s”.
In the anything goes English (American) language, it is acceptable. Like verb-ing nouns and noun-ing verbs, it’s all good in the hood.
I prefer “on site” but, as you stated, the industry has adopted “on premise” as the chosen term.
“ON PREMISE” DELENDA EST!
After consulting my Webster’s Dictionary it appears that the use of “premise” is correct
Your Webster’s is wrong!
I agree with Ed. If Webster has that type of error, I would replace it with an Oxford. I use the word Premise often in my work, and its different than Premises. Sage also needs a technical writer.