What does 'bespoken' signify, as opposed to 'bespoke'?

Question

The verb bespeak admits two past participles: bespoke and bespoken. I am interested in the attributive usage of these terms.

A bespoke suit is one tailored to please and to fit a particular customer. Occasionally, bespoken is used in the same sense. I am puzzled by the difference. Personally I find bespoken to be rarer, and Google seems to concur.

My question is, whether the two are interchangeable, or whether a preference of one over the other is significant in terms of register, region, or whether there is actually a nuance in meaning.

Answer 1

Bespoken appears to be the original term before "bespoke" was used to mean custom-made. Its usage in that sense is now archaic and rare:

Bespoke (adj.):

• "custom or custom-made, made to order," of goods, as distinguished from ready-made, 1755, the same sense found earlier in bespoken (c. 1600), past participle of bespeak, in a sense of "to speak for, to arrange beforehand," a sense attested in bespeak from 1580s. Now usually of tailored suits.

Etymonline

Ngram bespoke vs bespoken

Answer 2

A suit is "bespoke" as opposed to "tailored" or "custom made" but that doesn't mean any of them is "bespoken…”

I think a “bespoke” suit is one that will be spoken about before completion, in the sense of discussing all the little details. It hasn’t yet been stitched, so it can’t be seen on the hanger.

I think a “bespoken” suit is one that has been spoken for already, in the sense of having been reserved. It might be hanging on display but it’s already been sold.

I thought “bespoken” might also be heard in furniture showrooms or on garage forecourts and that rather obviously, the other main use of that tense was in marriage contracts: a man, more usually a woman “bespoken” was a more poetic, romantic or more formal, albeit rather archaic option for the modern “spoken for” but pride goeth before a fall…

Asking Google for examples revealed “bespoken” to be so obscure, the only useful hit I got was from an anthropological study of the African Bemba, Seven Tribes of British Central Africa, by Elizabeth Colson, ‎Max Gluckman (1951)

On marriage customs of the Nyakyusa of South-Western Tangankyika we read that “A girl who is bespoken in infancy does not, ideally, go to live altogether with her husband till after she has reached puberty...”

In the sense of software development, I certainly heard the term “bespoke software” along with "bespoke solutions" in daily use for years among developers, vendors and users before, for instance, Apple’s Lisa came out in 1983 or the Edsel Apple III in 1980 though perhaps not before the Apple II in 1977.