When did waiting lists become wait lists?

‘Here you are. This is a funny one. It would suit you,’ said my husband unkindly, showing me online a picture of a tight-skinned model wearing an XS size barn-style ‘Balmoral’ cotton jacket made by Helsa, with faux-fur collar and cuffs and a cinched-in waist: £419. He found the idea of me with a cinched waist irresistibly funny.

For another £80 I could have bought a Balmoral 1700mm Double Ended Roll Top Bath with White Claw & Ball Feet, reduced from £899. Balmoral seems to figure frequently in the nomenclature of sanitary ware, along with Sandringham, Windsor, Richmond, Clarence (butt of Malmsey), Carlton (Prince Regent) and Worsley (the late Duchess of Kent), as though past members of the royal family had sanctified them with their bottoms. One lavatory is even called the Imperial Regent, which is even more than Prinny laid claim to.

When not in the bathroom, royal types are assumed to be out in the open air, perhaps pursuing faux-furry creatures. The Sandringham estate has actually joined the market, offering a Classic Sandringham Tweed Tie for £49, and matching cap, scarf and blanket, all slightly confusingly ‘handmade in Scotland by family business Johnstons of Elgin’.

My husband had rooted out the jacket offer because we were discussing a news item in the Sun. ‘I bought this coat online,’ Ellie Smith told the paper, with reference to the Balmoral. ‘It was on a wait list, it was like £400, it was from America, it took time.’ Then she saw ‘basically the exact same’ for £75 in Marks and Spencer. Even my husband could see that it was not the same. It lacked fur. But what interested me was the phrase wait list. It sounded wrong. The OED, that store of real intelligence, revealed that wait list has been around only since about 1960, originally and chiefly in the United States. Waiting list has been in use since the 1890s. 

Wait list was three times as common in 2010 as in 1960. But waiting list is 30 times as frequent as wait list. If we can have wait lists, what next, wash powder, run shoes, feed frenzies? – Dot Wordsworth