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Put out: to produce for sale - MW

According to this definition, as long as something is produced for sale, we can use "put out" instead. However, I'm not sure why but I don't feel like they're the same. I mean I see produce being used in a variety of contexts, but it's not really the case for put out.

So, when CAN'T I use "put out" to replace "produce" when it comes to making things for sale?

Do people say, for example, put out a number/an amount of rice, vegetables, cars, TVs, paper, wood pulp, steel?

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    I would describe this as a case of words that have an overlapping but not identical semantic range. To me, put out is a physical action, such as putting items out on a table for sale at a farmers' market. Produce can also have this physical sense (produce a driver's licence upon request), but it can have other more abstract meanings (eg where production describes the whole manufacturing process of a company.)
    – Peter Kirkpatrick
    Commented Jul 31 at 5:03
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    I can't think of any such context where I would use put out to mean make, produce, manufacture, sell, offer, market, advertise, launch, or similar. Sure - put out would probably always be contextually understandable, but it definitely sounds a bit odd to me. Bear in mind that even with the preposition, to put out has an incredibly wide range of meanings, so for the OP's specific sense it would be essential to ensure the context makes it crystal clear which sense is actually intended.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented 2 days ago
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    @TimR: I probably do! But results from Google Books don't have the same immediate impact, for people who don't already know whatever the stats are showing (I almost always know what to expect from NGrams before generating a chart, precisely because I do know English well). Seriously, though, are you suggesting I need to read more books to improve my command of English? That's a ridiculous thing to say!
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented 2 days ago
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    ...here's a relevant NGram chart showing ...factory produces many... and ...factory makes many... Where as expected, ...factory puts out many... doesn't occur often enough to even show on the chart!
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented 2 days ago
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    I never disputed that. But I think it's pretty obvious the vast majority of native Anglophones usually use other words, so I think it's not a good idea to encourage non-native learners to adopt a minority usage that depends so heavily on context to convey meaning.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented 2 days ago

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You write, “According to this definition, as long as something is produced for sale, we can use ‘put out’ instead” [emphasis added]. But that’s not how definitions work. As an example, just because some dictionary might list one definition of receive as “get,” that doesn’t mean we can say, *”receive up” to mean “arise” or *”receive away” to mean “escape.”

To put it more specifically, the actual significance of the dictionary entry that you cite is that in some contexts, put out is used with the same meaning of “to produce for sale.” In other cases, what an entry for a word A is telling you is that when you encounter the word A you may take it to mean B. But that’s a very different assertion than “You may freely substitute the word A anywhere you encounter B,” because B may have several distinct meanings.

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    I like your answer but it doesn't actually answer the question...
    – Lambie
    Commented yesterday
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Put out is typically closer to meaning of "release" in the sense of "making available", instead of "produce" in the sense of "create."

I've put out the food for the guests

I may have also cooked (created) the food, but that's a guess and not expressed in that statement.

It gets confusing because a meaning of produce is "make visible or available" - e.g.

Sally said she was hiding a secret note in her hand. I asked her to show it to me, and she produced a crumpled piece of paper.

but this does not mean Sally manufactured the piece of paper.

Do people say, for example, put out a number/an amount of rice, vegetables, cars, TVs, paper, wood pulp, steel?

What makes "put out" mean "create" in your example is context, which can override word meanings in English easily--especially with a small group of short English words with 15-20 or more meanings in the dictionary (other examples being set and get).

Because the list of items here seem to be bulk quantities or big stuff - e.g. rice, vegetables, cars - and aren't related to each other (e.g. it's not common/usual to buy vegetables and cars at the same store) it creates a context where "put out=create" makes sense.

If I'm working or talking about a factory, that's another example where context might lead someone to think "put out=create", e.g. "We put out tons and tons of paper a year."

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    "context, which can override word meanings in English easily" — Because this sort of thing comes up all the time when I see an ell.SE or english.SE (and other SE sites for other human languages) question in the sidebar: this is not at all a unique feature of English! Speakers of all or nearly all world languages use sarcasm (and other forms of irony), metaphor, etc. Yet it seems like I constantly see language students somehow surprised to learn that this is also true of the language they're learning.
    – Karl Knechtel
    Commented 2 days ago
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    put out can mean release too but that is not the question here.
    – Lambie
    Commented yesterday
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You might say something like:

The farm puts out sixty tonnes of rice a year.

It's not a common use for "put out", and seems to be limited to large quantities. It has something of an "industrial" sense; it isn't about a craft-type production. This sense also may be more common in particular subcultures of American business. The phrase has lots of other meanings, and there are lots more meanings of put + {PP} in which the prepositional phrase starts with out.

On balance, you should probably not use this sense of the phrasal verb often. You should prefer "produce" or "emit", according to sense.

The "moral" to this answer is: It can be difficult to use a single dictionary definition alone to learn new words. It is better to see examples of real use, or at least compare several dictionaries. I used Cambridge, Wiktionary and Collins, and each gave me some further understanding of the meaning. Cambridge mentions the "large amount", Wiktionary notes the meaning also overlaps with "emit", and Collins indicates the British/American difference.

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    I disagree. It's common in business writing.
    – Lambie
    Commented 2 days ago
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    I agree, that's what I mean by "business subcultures"
    – James K
    Commented 2 days ago
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    I wouldn't ever say "the farm emits sixty tonnes of rice a year". "Produce" makes sense. All three versions are understandable, but the normal word is "produce" in my opinion. Either "emit" or "produce" could be used for pollutants (the farm emits sixty tonnes of nitrates into the river each year)
    – Stack Exchange Broke The Law
    Commented yesterday
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Question: Do people say, for example, put out a number/an amount of rice, vegetables, cars, TVs, paper, wood pulp, steel?

Yes, generally. But not usually for agriculture or food.

Rice and vegetables are grown for sale, not made.

However, to use put out it needs to be associated with production. "put out" is related to the noun output.

  • rice produced or grown per year
  • vegetables produced or grown per year

For food, generally, we'd say produced for grown, but we would not say "rice put out per year", except maybe in spoken language.

For other items that are produced in terms of manufacturing where there is an output of products or production output, put out does work. output is the noun and the verb is put out. It can be used as a substitute for produced.

  • Our factory put out [produced, made, manufactured] 10,000 vacuum cleaners last month.
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  • In an agribusiness context you will find it used, if not on the "family farm".
    – TimR
    Commented 2 days ago
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    @TimR Generally, it would not be used. Maybe in a long article where a synonym is needed to avoid repetition.
    – Lambie
    Commented 2 days ago
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put out The verb is often used when stating what sort of product(s) a business (or a country's businesses in the aggregate) produces.

The company puts out a line of pasta sauces.

The company puts out a line of blended scotch Whiskies.

"Bayer put out aspirin then in powder form in sealed one-ounce boxes obtainable only on a doctor's prescription."

put out is also used to express the quantity of items a factory or production facility has produced in a given period, its output:

The company's Cleveland plant put out over 100,000 vehicles in 2016.

"Italy produces about 1 percent of the world output of arsenic. Practically all of the arsenic is produced in the province of Novara, which in 1937 put out 15,880 metric tons of ore valued at L 2,064,000..." Civil Affairs Handbook: Italy, US Army (1942).

P.S. Another user has asked me to mention that put out has quite a few meanings. Farm acreage can be put out (devoted) to a certain crop and a racing stallion can be put out to stud when his racing days are over. A publishing house can put out books on a variety of topics. You can put out (extinguish) a fire. A radio transmitter can put out a signal. You can put the cat out (i.e. place it outdoors to roam the neighborhood and kill songbirds). A sharp stick can put out an eye. You can put out your tongue to express disgust or disrespect. Etc.

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  • A warning, there's a number of Google Books examples which are false positives and include —just on the first page alone: “… one death factory put out of action …, ”… Only days later, he acquired the adjoining fireworks factory, put out of business…”, “What did we expect when a city factory put out stories that made life seem sheepish?”
    – Mari-Lou A ♦
    Commented 19 hours ago
  • @Mari-LouA Among the hits there are plenty of valid attestations; there's no way to prevent the inclusion of items that match the string but don't match the syntactic pattern, given the limitations of the Google search box.
    – TimR
    Commented 19 hours ago
  • Yes there are examples of valid, pertinent usages but I think you should mention that put out can have several meanings, and can be part of a longer multi-word phrase such as put out of (business)
    – Mari-Lou A ♦
    Commented 18 hours ago
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Put out is commonly used for intangible things and physical media that are made available for sale or paid viewing (whether selling as physical objects like vinyl records and DVDs, or charging people to listen/watch/download).

  • A musical artist puts out a single or album
  • A video game company puts out a new game
  • A movie company puts out a film
  • A podcaster puts out a new episode of a podcast

When used for physical objects you might talk about a company putting out a new line of cars/food/phones. This sense, talking about the new concept or new product, is more common than referring to releasing another batch of the same item to market.

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Another place to avoid it is in cases where it might cause confusion or ambiguity.

Say you sell fireplaces, electric heaters, etc.

You don't want to say "Since I started, I've put out over 130 fires!"

Similarly, "put out" has special meanings for pets, trash bins, etc. So unless you're deliberately punning, it'd be worth avoiding it in those cases.

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    "Bring in the dog and put out the cat" is a lyric from the 1958 song "Yakety Yak" by The Coasters.
    – Fe2O3
    Commented yesterday

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