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I was thrown off when he told me that it was not a word, and the correct word was ‘obliged’. Sought some answers here. Good to see I wasn’t completely making up words.

Very amusing.

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Obligated does however have a legal meaning in the UK , as in an ‘obligated company’, that’s to say one bound by a legal contractual obligation.

I think the sticking point here is spoken or informal English, where in North America ‘obligated’ has become fashionable. Presumably there’s a reason for this, whether ‘obliged’ has a sense of Southern servility or connection to slavery as above suggested or whatever it may be.

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Obliged means that which one ought to do as determined by moral reasoning and not being necessarily connected with any specific event, and hence typically originating in pre-existing moral principles as applicable to a given context.

Obligated mean that which has arisen from a specific event in response to which what one ought to do is determinable by reference to a prior formulated plan of response, typically originating in a binding agreement (eg contract) or other force of law (eg tort or crime), where the obligations to act arise because of being obliged to abide by one’s word or to obey the law.

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Latin ‘obligatus,’ past participle of ‘obligare’

The etymology of ‘oblige’ is given as:

Middle English, from Anglo-French ‘obliger,’ from Latin ‘obligare,’

M-W dates ‘obligate’ to 1533, ‘oblige’ to the 14th century. For you history buffs, that’s well before the English language arrived in the New World. (Interestingly, M-W dates ‘obligated’ and ‘obligation’ to the 14th century, which means that ‘obligate’ must also be that old.)

Both are (primarily) transitive verbs, and while they can be used interchangeably in some cases, their definitions are somewhat different:

Obligate:

1: to bind legally or morally
2: to commit (as funds) to meet an obligation

Oblige:

1: to constrain by physical, moral, or legal force or by the exigencies of circumstance

2: A: to put in one’s debt by a favor or service B : to do a favor for

I suspect that the ‘obligate,’ coming as it does from Latin, was introduced as a legal term–a more narrowly defined term than ‘oblige.’

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As an aside, 'British-English' generally refers to 'English-English' [ie received pronunciation], and shouldnt be used to include Scottish terms. As i understand it, this is because in the days of the British Empire, the words English and British were generally given the same meaning in popular usage, which is something that carries on to some extent to this day – I do it myself in fact. When someone describes a thing as British i generally take that to mean English. Which doesn't always go down well, as I'm an Englishman in Scotland.

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