Meaning
Said of plans, products, reforms, orders, money or other things that are being prepared, processed or developed and are expected to arrive or take effect in due course: under way but not yet complete, delivered or public. It covers anything from legislation awaiting approval to funds budgeted but not yet spent, and often carries a hint that completion, though expected, is slow. Business and political journalism register. Usually implies eventual completion or delivery, sometimes with a note of impatience (stuck in the pipeline). The noun pipeline has separate later senses in surfing and computing. Regional use: Originally American English; now standard in British, Australian and international English.
Origin
The image is industrial: whatever is pumped into a pipeline is committed and must eventually arrive. The OED records the noun pipeline from 1856, in The Times (London), with its earliest subject area the oil and gas industry. Christine Ammer traces the figurative path: by the 1920s pipeline also meant a channel of supplies or information, and her Dictionary of Cliches says the idiom itself 'came into use about thirty years later' - while her American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms labels the under-way sense colloquial from the 1940s and a budgeted-but-unspent sense from the second half of the 1900s. The Cliches volume quotes the London Observer of 1964: 'there are measures in the pipeline already'. McGraw-Hill glosses the phrase as backed up somewhere in a process; in process; in a queue. So the literal nineteenth-century conduit noun predates the figurative idiom by roughly ninety years: the idiom is mid-twentieth-century American colloquial, now common across British and world English.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- down the pipeline
- in the hopper
- in the works
Usage Examples
- The vaccine is in the pipeline, but regulators are unlikely to approve it before spring.
- We have three new funding schemes in the pipeline for next year, so apply early.
- With the factory closing and nothing in the pipeline to replace it, the town faces a hard decade.