Separated by a Common Language

administration and government

2026-04-12T21:01:00.005+01:00

It's about time this topic has its own blog post. It's been an aside to other discussions on several occasions. It's not so much a difference between American and British English per se, but a difference in how our political systems work, and hence a difference in which words we need to use about them.

PM's Question Time at UK parliament (Wikimedia commons)

Because the UK has a parliamentary system of government, the political party that controls the parliament is the ruling party of the government as a whole. So, people talk about the Labour government or the Conservative government when that party has the majority of seats in the House of Commons, since that party chooses the person who will be prime minister, who then makes the political appointments to cabinet positions. That party is, essentially, governing.

The US has a presidential system, in which the president is elected independently of the legislature. The executive (presidential) and legislative branches of government are accorded their own powers, and the party in control of the executive branch may not be in control of either or both of the legislative chambers (the Senate and the House of Representatives). So when talking about the president and cabinet, it's inaccurate to say things like the Obama government (let me live in the past, please), since the president leads only one branch of the government. Instead, we usually speak of the Obama administration.

So, this isn't really a difference between AmE and BrE because if Americans talk about British politics, they would need the more parliamentary language, and if Britons talk about American politics, they'll need the more presidential language, for accuracy. But do people always speak accurately about these things?

For government, they mostly do. The images below show the most common words between the and government in the AmE & BrE parts of the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, which was collected in 2012–13, when the UK had a coalition government of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. There, you can see coalition and Labour in the UK data, but only general adjectives and countries in the American. That hasn't changed in more recent data. There's little talk about the Biden government or the Trump government.

Most common words before government in GloWbE AmE subcorpus

Most common words before government in GloWbE BrE subcorpus

At American sub-national levels, it works the same: American states have 'presidential' systems (just with governors, rather than presidents) and therefore they have administrations led by the governors, and American cities generally have city councils and mayors (details vary from state/city to state/city), and so we can talk of the administration of a mayor or a governor. You can see that in the GloWbE results below, where administration is mostly prefaced by names of presidents, but also, at the bottom Bloomberg, who was mayor of New York City at the time.

most common words between the and administration in US GloWbE

In the UK, Wales and Scotland have their own parliaments, and so we see them having governments in the chart above. At the county and city level, there are councils, and people tend to use the word council instead of government at the local level—e.g. the Labour council.

Directly elected mayors are a 21st-century thing in England, and we don't yet seem to be seeing much use of mayor's name + administration. I tried Johnson administration in GloWbE (since Boris J was London mayor in GloWbE time), but all examples in the UK referred to Lyndon Baines Johnson, the American president—and most of the other the ___ administration examples in UK GloWbE refer to American politics. (I also looked for the Khan administration in a more current corpus, but there one finds it referring to Pakistani politics, not the government of London.) But there is an interesting point at the bottom of this chart:

most common words between the and administration in UK GloWbE

The Labour administration is about 29 times less common than the Labour government, but it's there. A closer look at the data indicates that this use of administration is more common in Scotland—with most, if not all of the Labours from Scotland, and certainly all of the SNPs (Scottish National Party):

the + [UK party name] + administration

But that usage is going up, across the country:

the Labour/Conservative administration in the News on the Web corpus (UK part)

Without any willingness to go through a lot of examples, I can't tell you how many of these administrations refer to the UK government versus devolved country governments or local governments, but I believe there's a mix. There are a very small number of cases of the Sunak administration and the Starmer administration as well.

Administration is not the first US political word I've seen used in a slightly-less-appropriate way in the UK: gerrymander was my US-to-UK Word of the Year in 2016. But lest you think political words only go in one direction, I'll point you to backbencher, my 2015 UK-to-US Word of the Year.

alongside

2026-03-21T23:42:00.038+00:00

A few months ago, an American friend of my spouse asked him to ask me: "Why is everyone suddenly saying alongside?" I hadn't noticed it at that point, but once he'd mentioned it, I felt surrounded by alongside.

As this Google Books ngram shows, the word has taken off in the 21st century:

Separating out the British and American books, we can see that this is a British-led trend.
Alongside climbed in British usage throughout the 20th century. American English suddenly decided to (orig. AmE) play catch-up in the 21st century.

This trend is observable in other corpora too. The News on the Web corpus, for example, shows more than double the rate of alongside in British news sources versus American ones.

alongside by country

And within the US News data, the rise of alongside has sped up since 2020.

alongside on just American news sites

Among(st) the prepositions, alongside is a relative (orig. AmE) newbie. In the OED, where it's marked as "originally nautical," its first citation is from 1704; its definition: "In a position parallel to; side by side with; close to the side of; next to, beside." So the examples are about boats positioned next to other boats or docks, etc. It seems to have gradually moved onto land, especially in the UK, in the 19th century.

So why have Americans suddenly (orig. AmE) taken a shine to alongside? Why is it more attractive than along or beside or next to? Wondering whether there was a trend toward(s) longer, British prepositions, I tried comparing it to amongst. But the more-BrE amongst seems to have peaked in AmE about 12 years ago:

amongst on American news websites

In 2013, the online magazine Slate published an article by Ben Yagoda about Americans saying amongst instead of among. Perhaps once people were talking about the "British invasion" of amongst, Americans became more self-conscious about it. If Ben published an article about alongside, could that change its fortunes?

Having had alongside pointed out to me, I'm now self-conscious about using it. But this blog gives us a record of me using it:

"BrE has kerb for the edging alongside a road" (curb/kerb, May 2020)
"British pigs in blankets are small sausages wrapped in bacon (and cooked!). They are delicious. They're traditionally served alongside turkey as part of Christmas dinner." (pigs in blankets, Feb 2020)
"I've seen a lot of "down with grammar!" messages, often alongside 'learning should be fun!'" (grammar is not the enemy, May 2016)

So, what do you think: do I sound Britified when I say such things, or is alongside completely international now?

***

PS: Searching for commentary about alongside, I found some concern about the use of alongside with. Further (orig. BrE) rooting around in the corpora, though, show that alongside with is a tiny proportion of alongside usages (0.7 per million words in AmE, 0.8 per million words in BrE in the NOW corpus).

Are these words misspelled/misspelt most?

2026-02-26T11:33:00.008+00:00

The people at WordUnscrambler.pro sent me a list of "the most misspelled (BrE misspelt*) words" for the UK. I get a lot of these "we did this thing so that your blog will give us free advertising," and I usually ignore them, but I'll give this one some attention—partly because they sent a US list to Language Log (who published it), so I can do some comparison.

But I first have to gripe a bit. Here's the methodology:

We analyzed Jan 1, 2025 - Dec 17, 2025 search data from Google Trends for "How do you spell" and "How to spell".

That's not a method for discovering the "most misspelled words." That's a method for discovering the most looked-up spellings. This is the kind of (BrE) jiggery-pokery makes me hate headlines. If you think to look up a word, then you might be insecure or curious about its spelling. But that's keeping you from misspelling it. I'm betting that when they're not looking up spellings like these, those people are out in the world (like the rest of us) are confidently spelling accommodation with one m and letting spellcheck catch it for them (or not).

Nevertheless, the WU.pro folks showed admirable linguistic sensitivity in not declaring the Americanisms on the list "misspelled." Instead, they note repeatedly that both the US and UK variants "are correct".

United Kingdom's most ~~misspelled words~~ queried spellings:
1.     Colour - 109 200 searches - Both colour and color are correct.
2.     Favourite - 82 900 searches - Both favourite and favorite are correct.
3.     License - 59 000 searches.
4.     Diarrhoea - 58 700 searches - Both diarrhoea and diarrhea are correct.
5.     Jewellery - 56 400 searches.
6.     Definitely - 53 000 searches.
7.     Auntie - 50 400 searches - Both auntie and aunty are correct.
8.     Weird - 48 000 searches.
9.     Business - 46 800 searches.
10.   Behaviour - 40 800 searches - Both behaviour and behavior are correct.
11.   Neighbour - 39 600 searches - Both neighbour and neighbor are correct.
12.   Country - 29 000 searches.
13.   Queue - 22 800 searches.
14.   Gorgeous - 22 600 searches.
15.   Necessary - 23 000 searches.

I've added the blue to show which ones are also on the US top 10, which I've copied at the bottom of this post.† (Not sure why the UK got a top 15 and the US a top 10. Nor why necessary has more searches but is lower on the list than queue.)

Some of these are definitely difficult—others, like country, surprised me. But let's have a little look at whether people do misspell them, using the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. (I'm using that one even though it's 13 years old now because web-based English is more likely to include misspellings than the published writing in other comparative corpora.) I won't try to cover all of them, just the ones that strike me as transatlantically interesting.

Postscript : On the same day as I wrote this post, another company released its (much better) analysis of British misspellings. See the bottom of this post for more on that.

US/UK variants

Where there are US/UK variants, it's often the case that the corpus has included American writing and tagged it as GB because it's on a British website (or vice versa). For that reason, I've (in another post) used -or/our spellings as a diagnostic for how reliable the country tagging is in GloWbE. So, it's not necessarily the case that BrE writers are mispelling them.

-or/-our

In that vein, the following graph shows that there's probably more AmE writing on UK websites than BrE writing on AmE websites—which is not so surprising, since there are presumably about 5 times more US than UK writers on the internet and text from American wire services and other companies might be reprinted wholesale on UK sites.

rates of -our versus -or spellings in GloWbE

But the other thing to take from the our/or chart is: Canadian spelling is in crisis. The (standard Canadian) -our spellings only just outnumber the -or ones. Meanwhile, the Canadian Prime Minister recently got into trouble for using British -ise spellings that are not traditionally Canadian.

licence/license

License is a tricky one because it's the correct spelling for BrE, when it is a verb. But it is licence in BrE when it is a noun (s in AmE for both). The first chart here shows a lot of (incorrect for BrE) license as a noun in the GB corpus—but that will, again, be partly due to American writing on British websites, rather than British writers misspelling it. It's hard to know how much each factor contributes.

So, more interesting from a misspelling standpoint is licenced, which is incorrect in all Englishes, but about 5% of the UK spellings. License is definitely a word that Britons misspell.

I was surprised not to see practice/practise on the UK misspelling list. You can read more about that at an older post, if you'd like to.

Diarrhea/diarrhoea

This one seems to have little to do with US/UK confusion. Diarrh(o)ea is just difficult and unpleasant for everyone. And personal: everybody's misspelling it their own ways:

(The crossed-out ones are names that happened to be caught on my search for "diarr*a". I don't envy them their diarr-a names.)

jewellery/jewelry

Jewellery is not marked with "jewelry is also correct" in WU.pro's list, but jewelry is the correct spelling in AmE. The AmE/BrE spelling difference is surely adding to the confusion about how to spell it, but the word is just difficult in its own right, with that double L and three-syllable pronunciation (=jewelry). Here's a shortened list of spellings in GloWbE (there are lots more one-off spellings), where the older, now-AmE spelling jewelry appears more than 1/3 of the time on the UK sites, but some definite misspellings make their way in too.

The later jewellery spelling seems to have derived from jeweller + y ('the stuff that the jeweller makes'—analogous to pottery) while jewelry derives from jewel+ry ('products created from jewels'—analogous to pastry, balladry). In 1901, the OED commented (about BrE usage):

In commercial use commonly spelt jewellery; the form jewelry is more rhetorical and poetic, and unassociated with the jeweller. But the pronunciation with three syllables is usual even with the former spelling.

So, we might consider jewelry to be AmE and old-fashioned BrE.

Words that are just hard to spell

Weird

It's been my perception that weird is more a problem in UK spelling, and GloWbE bears that out a little bit, with wierd a greater proportion of the UK forms (about 3%) than the US (about 2%):

country

Most people don't seem to have a problem with spelling country, but those who misspell it are not more likely to be British:

queue

The word is much more common in BrE, but hard to spell everywhere. And yet, people seem to mostly get it right. Leaving off the final e sometimes happens, but really not much:

I'd expected to find the word spelled like its homonyms cue and Q, but there aren't many such misspellings. For the following chart, I searched for queue, queu, que, Q and cue, but none of the queu spellings showed up in the 'in a' phrasing:

The Q spelling might be an abbreviation, rather than a misspelling. But it's striking that the cue homonym is absent from the British entirely. These people know a queue's a queue.

I'm going to leave it there! But feel free to comment on these or the other words on the lists.

Footnotes

* The fact that misspelled/misspelt has two spellings complicates the old joke: Which word is always misspelled? Misspelled! (Or is it misspelt?) Anyway, I have an old post on -ed versus -t past tenses.

† The American list, via Language Log:
America's most misspelled words:

Definitely – 33 500 searches.
Separate – 30 000 searches.
Necessary – 29 000 searches.
Believe – 28 500 searches.
Through – 28 000 searches.
Gorgeous – 27 000 searches.
Neighbor – 25 500 searches.
Business – 24 200 searches.
Favorite – 23 000 searches.
Restaurant – 22 500 searches.

------------------------------------------------------

Postscript (28 Feb): Another study!

Another company's marketing ploy, but a much better analysis of misspelling (though only for children):

Around 530 million spelling attempts from 936,926 pupils across the country were examined by education platform EdShed to draw their results, determining which words schoolchildren find most tricky. (The Independent)

Their list has only two overlaps with the WordUnscrambler one:

Sketch
Mischievous
February
Couldn't
Mustn't
License
Definitely
Indefinite
Convenience
Preferred

nostalgia for present-day British English

2026-02-04T00:01:00.006+00:00

I get various Google Alerts for things related to my interests, and today I got one for a story in The Sun and the Daily Express about the '20 English words the public wants to revive'.

Now, if I want to read these articles, I have to pay or give them my first-born, or something like that, so I'm not rushing to read them. But I've got enough of a gist from the Google Alert (orig. AmE) blurb:

The "research", it seems, has been done in the hallowed halls of the Tesco Mobile marketing department, with the celebrity endorsement of Tom Daley and Gyles Brandreth. (There is a video on the various tabloid websites, again, if you want to allow them to put the devil's cookies in your computer.)

But it's enough to read that little blurb: flabbergasted, chuffed, and gobsmacked. The "British public" (Tesco Mobile customers?) wants to "revive" these "classic" words. You know, those moribund words that... wait a minute...

All three of these words seem to be in (BrE) rude health. Have a look at their use in British books. More and more in the 21st century:

Calling something that didn't exist before 1980 a "classic" that needs to be "revived" when in reality, it's just reaching its prime is blatant ageism, I say. Gobsmacked, I feel your pain.

But maybe books are weird. Maybe "real" people don't use these words. Maybe not, but the tabloid newspapers have certainly been reviving them for the past 30 years. Here's what you see if you search for these words in the archives of The Sun (courtesy of Nexis):

Each of those words is used more now than in the 1990s, and each has a peak around 2012. I'm not willing at this moment to dive deep enough into the Sun archives to fully analy{s/z}e that, but could the Olympics have something to do with that?

Are we the British public really missing these "classic" Britishisms? Or are we just missing feeling good about ourselves?

US-to-UK Word of the Year 2025: zee

2025-12-31T19:32:00.003+00:00

And the 2025 Separated by a Common Language US-to-UK Word of the Year is (sorta kinda):

zee (but mostly Gen Z)

I must start by assuring you: British people generally do not call the letter zee. Nevertheless, I have reasons for choosing zee this year:

It is winning (particularly among[st] the people it describes) as the pronunciation of the generation name: Gen Z.
It is a word that comes up when people express worries that British children are "using American words", that perennial clickbait that baited a particularly large number of clicks this year. It started with The Sunday Times commissioning a survey of teachers; the results of that survey were consistently (determinedly) misinterpreted. The Sunday Times article doesn’t mention zee, but it came up often in the interviews I did after it. If you're interested, here's an episode of Lexis podcast where we talk about the survey (and its problems).
It was also the Americanisms that the YouGov polling organi{s/z}tion chose for the title of its report on Americanism use in Britain in April.

source

The results of that poll are informative:

source

Essentially: the majority of Britons under 50 report using zee in the name Gen Z, with more than 70% of those under 24 (that is, in Gen Z) saying it. The majority of Britons over 50 say they say Gen-Zed. All age groups, however, say that the alphabet letter 'Z' rhymes with bed at rates above 70%. The younger age groups (versus the older) have more people claiming to say the alphabet with an ex-why-zee at the end, but more people say zed for the letter than say zee for the generation.

That's self-reported data, and self-reports of linguistic behavio(u)rs require corroboration. We can find that corroboration. On YouGlish, you can hear both Gen-Zee and Gen-Zed in British speakers, but it's mostly Gen-Zee, particularly among younger speakers. One of the British speakers (Jessica Kellgren-Fozard) says Gen-Zee most of the time, but does say Gen-Zed at least once in one of her videos—and it wouldn't be surprising if many other speakers are inconsistent in this particular zee/zed. If you search for British people saying zee on Youglish, you'll get mentions of people named Zee and a fair amount of Mock French ("I am zee dev-ille"), but the letter-name is only used in contrast with zed. (Searching for Z in YouGlish gets you people saying zzzzzz, rather than saying the letter name, as far as I've seen.)

My daughter "Grover," has done a little poll of her 17–18-year-old friends, who all say they say Gen-Zee (she certainly does). She also notes that if she flaunts her half-Americanness and says a zee for the letter, her English friends give her a very hard time.

But check out Generation Z: most of the speakers on YouGlish say this with zed (even younger ones). It seems that the more "formal" and semantically transparent version of the word is treated more as if the Z is the letter of the alphabet. Gen Z seems to be treated as something more opaque—a name. (Grover claims Gen Zed is "hard to say." It does sound a bit more like it might be a past-tense verb.)

The term Generation Z seems to have originated in 1993, and is not marked as American in dictionaries. Gen Z followed in 1996, and is listed as "originally N. American" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Against the evidence we've seen here, the OED lists the zed pronunciation first for BrE:

But, in keeping with the YouGlish evidence, they do not include the zee pronunciation for the full form:

Gen Z, however you pronounce them, were born between 1997 and 2012 (or thereabouts)—so the oldest Gen Zers (or Zoomers, which happens to be the 2025 Russian WotY) were 28 in 2025, and the youngest ones entered their teens. So, they've become increasingly newsworthy and we're hearing Gen Z more. Here is how often Gen Z is used in the British part of the News on the Web corpus:

Those mentions will probably continue to go up as more of the group reaches adulthood. And some of them will be reaching voting age sooner than that.

(Happy Birthday, Grover!)

Zee and Zed
Sesame Street
Anti-Americanismism, Part 2
Zebra
Introducing Grover: Can you believe that she is 18?! She's gone from minor to major.

UK-to-US Word of the Year 2025: fiddly

2025-12-30T22:19:00.016+00:00

The 2025 Separated by a Common Language UK-to-US Word of the Year is:

fiddly

Here's an English teacher
explaining the word

Someone might have recommended this to me this year—if so, please out yourself in the comments, since I cannot find a pixel trail for a recommender. But I did find it in an email conversation I had with Ben Yagoda in deciding the 2022 WotY, where he said:

Interesting slate of UK to US candidates, especially “soccer.” Didn’t realize about shrinkflation. Fiddly definitely.

Why did I wait till this year to crown fiddly SbaCL WotY? Well, in 2022, fit was having a moment due to Love Island, so I put fiddly aside. Now fiddly's time has come. Just look at it going up in the US part of the News on the Web corpus:

Ben Yagoda first wrote about it as a Britishism in the US in 2016, after its first peak; then the shine went off it for a few years. Now it's back. Here are the most recent ten US citations from the NOW corpus:

Many things and activities here are fiddly: some kind of electronic device, rolling and stuffing a baked good, cleaning ear buds, a fictional mystery story, installing something on a bike, actions in video games, frostings and icings on Christmas cookies, using an infant car seat, paperwork. It looks like it's being used just as it's used in BrE.

And if you haven't yet figured out what it means, Merriam-Webster's definition goes like this:

fiddly
adjective
fid·dly ˈfi-dᵊl-ē
chiefly British
: requiring close attention to detail : fussy
especially : requiring an annoying amount of close attention
… the tiny control buttons on the back are fiddly.—M. J. McNamara

As a -y adjective, it's a little odd, since -y is usually added to nouns. Fiddly derives (according to the OED) from the verb fiddle 'To make aimless or frivolous movements' (OED), not the noun. That verb does ultimately come from the noun fiddle, but that's not what's relevant to a suffix that usually attaches to nouns. The suffix wants something that's a noun now, as in cinnamon-y or snowy. But the OED tells us of -y adjectives:

Later new derivatives tend in a large measure to be colloquial, undignified, or trivial,as bumpy, dumpy, flighty, hammy, liney, loopy, lumpy, ungy, messy, oniony, treey, verminy, vipery; some are from verbs, as dangly.

Fiddly only came into being in the early 20th century, the period of "colloquial, undignified, or trivial" -y adjectives. And indeed the OED marks fiddly as "colloquial".

I'll be happy to have it in AmE, as it is undeniably useful. The Collins thesaurus offers some synonyms:

pernickety (=AmE persnickety), tricky, detailed, fine, exacting

I think tricky would work best for some of the things I call fiddly, but tricky seems to connote a challenge, rather than a hassle. Fiddly is all hassle, dexterity, and attention to detail.

Congratulations, fiddly. You've made it.

pleaded and pled

2025-11-23T18:16:00.015+00:00

I may have promised another topic for this month's blog...but another request has (orig. AmE) come over the transom, and I'm easily distractable, so...

Mike C from Shropshire asks:

Even most BBC news reporters seem to be using “pled” as the past tense / past participle. … Any thoughts?

Thoughts? Do I have thoughts? I am plagued by them!

Pleading and plea-ing

Let's start with a basic observation of pled versus pleaded: the use of pled is ~~fairly particular to~~ much more common in legal pleas. One can have pled guilty, innocent, (AmE) no contest, or (AmE) the fifth, though many sources would tell you to use pleaded instead. So we get:

He pled guilty = real but prescriptively frowned-upon
She pleaded guilty = real & prescriptively cherished
He pleaded for their forgiveness = real & common
?? She pled for their forgiveness. = ~~unnatural-sounding~~ much less common overall (except maybe for Scottish English speakers? See below and comments) and prescriptively frowned-upon

As you can see in the Corpus of Historical American English, it's rare to have pled for anything, but things can be pleaded for:

Because of this, I'm going to focus my corpus searches on use of pleaded/pled guilty.

The British history of pled

Since this is Separated by a Common Language, we have to ask: is this an Americanism coming into British English? And the answer is: Wait a minute!

The Oxford English Dictionary labels pled "(chiefly Scottish and U.S.)." There's lots of evidence of pled in BrE before it could reasonably be thought of as an imported Americanism—it goes back to the 1600s. In Hansard, the parliamentary record, it's found here and there since the late 19th century:

pled guilty in Hansard

I haven't checked every example, but in the 1890s and 1990s all of the pled guilty examples are from Scottish Members of Parliament:

The 1990s examples are all quoting or paraphrasing the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995. Since it's in the law in Scotland, it should probably be considered fairly standard there.

So, pled is a form with a long history in one part of the UK, at least. With the BBC diversifying its on-screen workforce in recent decades, there may be a rise in south-of-the-border exposure to that particular form of the verb. (I've talked about Scottish bureaucratese moving south in at least one other post.)

The American history of pled

So pled might come to the US with Scottish immigrants. But.

In AmE pled really gets going in the late 20th century. The biggest waves of Scottish migration to the US had happened (as far as I can find out) in the late colonial period (when they would have accounted for a much larger proportion of the English-speakers in the US, and therefore might have had a greater effect on American English, than later immigrants would). It's possible that it was very common in speech in earlier times and had to become "respectable" before making it into writing much (as is thought to have happened for gotten).

On the other hand, it's very possible that pled was re-invented in the US, on analogy with lead-led and read-read [rɛd]. Certainly, the similarity between pled and these "legit" past forms paves the way for implicit acceptance of pled.

At any rate, the number of pled guilty remains a smaller number than pleaded guilty in the Corpus of Historical American English. But this corpus is mostly written English, much of it edited. I'd expect that there's more pled in speech. That's harder to get one's hands on.

Pled guilty in speech

I had a look at the Open American Corpus (Spoken) from the early 2000s and there was just one example of pleaded and pled each. Spoken corpora just tend to be so much smaller, and so they're not great for tracking vocabulary. And, of course, there are no audio recordings of way-back-when. (Note that the Hansard Corpus above is of transcribed speech—we have to assume it's a pretty good fascimile of the speech.)

The Open Subtitles 2018 (English) corpus (which I've accessed via Sketch Engine) contains scripted (film/movie) speech. That's not the same as natural speech, but the people writing the speech have every motivation to make it sound natural. What's interesting there is the turnaround of pled's fortunes:

pled guilty: 356
pleaded guilty: 295

I can look at these in films shot in the UK versus shot in the USA. Because there's probably more AmE than BrE in the raw numbers above, when we compare by country, we need to 'normali{s/z}e' the numbers. So here, they're expressed as 'occurrences per million words' of the corpus:

	UK	USA
*pleaded guilty*	.02	.02
*pled guilty*	—	.07

While pled guilty is not found at all in the UK films, the lower numbers overall in UK films probably tells us that there are a lot more films about crime and legal proceedings in the American dataset.

**Is pled in UK English a case of "Americani{s/z}ation"?**

It's hard to say if BBC use of pled is Scottish voices, Scottish usage spreading or American usage borrowed. I'm going to vote for "probably all of the above". The prevalence of US courtrooms in media has led to The Law Society pointing out American things that show up in UK legal dramas: No gavels please, we're British.

At the same time, the evidence we have says that pleaded still outstrips pled in BrE by a long mile. Here's more from the up-to-yesterday News on the Web corpus, where pleaded guilty outnumbers pled guilty nearly 40-fold.

How many of those are Scottish? Well, quite a few, but it would be a lot of work to sort out both 'is this in a Scottish news site' and 'if it's not on a Scottish news site, is it talking about something or quoting someone Scottish?'. But I did take a sample of 100 and did a quick (more BrE) reckoning of what was what:

53 were from Scotland
30 were from either English local news or UK national news
10 were clearly North American stories in national news—so probably from wire services
1 Northern Irish
1 Wales
5 ?

I'd take the 30 English/UK national with a grain/pinch of salt because I didn't check whether they were about Scottish legal cases.

Is pled going up in the UK part of the news corpus: yes, but so is pleaded guilty—so it looks like there are just more legal cases in the news

pled guilty in NOW-GB

pleaded guilty in NOW-GB

Getting back to Mike's observation: it's tough to check the BBC directly: when I tried searching their website for pled guilty, it asked me "Did you mean: plea guilty, plead guilty?" The actual results had the word pledge and not pled. Searching via Google, the first bunch of results I got were all from Scotland. (There was only one BBC hit in my NOW sample of 100.)

I'll leave you with one more graph, from Google Books. The craziest thing in this graph is the fact that US pled guilty (orange line) has gone up so much in the past four decades whie never overtaking, or even denting, then numbers for pleaded guilty. While the use of pled guilty in UK books goes up a tiny bit in this century, it's worth noting that that's after the Criminal Procedure Act of 1995 (Scotland) and the Crime and Punishment Act of 1997 (Scotland) that include pled guilty (as well asl other laws that include pled).

hadn't have VERBed

2025-10-20T00:29:00.004+01:00

A great thing about being Facebook friends with linguists is that I get to benefit from their daily observations of English. Here's a recent observation from John Wells:

Something I've just heard on the telly about someone who nearly drowned: "If the fisherman hadn't've spotted him, he might not have survived."
I keep hearing this grammatical construction in BrE, with extra "have" ('ve) as compared with the standard "...hadn't spotted...".
But I have never come across any comment on, or discussion of, this usage.

In the comments, some people claim it's much used in the US, but it soon becomes clear that there's some confusion with a different construction than Wells was talking about. So, let's look at it.

I'm using the News on the Web corpus (because my usual go-to GloWbE corpus isn't co(-)operating in giving me the contractions). There I searched for "had n't have VERB" and got it with a range of verbs:

Where do those examples come from? Mostly the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. So it's not looking like a particularly American feature.

I didn't find any examples in the NOW corpus of hadn't've, which is not surprising, since double contractions are a more spoken phenomenon, less likely to be found on news sites (and as we've seen before, they're more common in written AmE than in written BrE).

Since the News on the Web Corpus is mostly edited English, I didn't expect to find a lot of examples where the have is represented as of, but the 13 I did fine were from those same countries. And this isn't surprising because as we've seen before, 've>of is more common in BrE than in AmE:

So, it's looking pretty British, but in Caroline McAfee's 'Characteristics of non-standard grammar in Scotland', she says "as in American English". (Bold = my emphasis, so it's clear which [more BrE] bits of the example we're talking about.)

In Scottish speech, as in American English, there is a sequence had – (ENCLITIC NEGATIVE PARTICLE) – have PAST PARTICIPLE. The identity of the second have, which appears as a weak or enclitic form, is problematic (as witness the writers who spell it of):

‘Ah wouldnae of came if Ah had of knew,’ he insisted (Helen W. Pryde, the First Book of the McFlannels, 1947: 24)

Adams (1948) suggested that it was a survival of English dialectal y- before past participles, reinterpreted as have via the latter’s weak form a. The occurrence of the form in Scotland and the USA is compatible with diffusion from Ulster. Fodor and Smith (1978) offer a purely synchronic analysis, seeing the first have as a modal and the second as the auxiliary of the perfect.

The British usage may have started in Scotland and now is more widespread. But what about that "as in American English"? Well, the historical picture in Google Ngrams gives us a different story from the contemporary NOW corpus. Here it is with had and been as the last verb in the search term:

Though in this century, hadn't have VERB looks more British, before 1880 or so, it seemed to be all-American. This was shortly after the "Great Migration" from Ulster, through which large numbers of Northern Irish Protestants (with Scottish heritage) moved to the colonies.

But why, if the construction comes from Scotland, don't we see more in the earlier period in the UK? It might just come down to the fact that this is a corpus of books, and not everyone gets to publish books: maybe New World Scots found it easier to get into print than the Old World ones—after all, they were now removed from the social structures that may not have favo(u)red them in publishing. Maybe UK-located speakers/writers of the time were more aware of the non-standardness of the construction and therefore less likely to use it.

The lesser use of it over time in AmE may be an effect of the lesser use of the perfect verb forms in AmE, whereby AmE now often uses simple past tense (I ate) instead of the perfect, as in I had eaten. It's hard to stick an extra have into your perfect verb string if you dialect doesn't use perfect verb forms much. (I also have to wonder if the US v UK editors might pick up on it and change it at different rates.)

caught + ADJ

2025-09-02T11:56:00.001+01:00

A shorter (maybe), quicker and earlier post this month, since I am going to be travel(l)ing without much internet access in September and am (orig. AmE) freaking out* about how much work I have to do before the autumn/fall semester begins.

In a recent Language Log post, Victor Mair points out a difference in how American and British teens might react to this shirt:

Americans would tend to say I wouldn't be caught dead in it but BrE speakers would more likely say I wouldn't be seen dead in it.

To me, these bring up different images, since caught is a more dynamic verb than seen. Those who are caught are generally trying not to be caught. I wore the t-shirt, but I wanted to avoid being seen in it. But those who are seen can't help being seen. If you say 'I wouldn't be seen dead in it', it sounds to me like you fear someone putting the t-shirt on you after you've died. But maybe that difference in imagery is just me. Most people aren't so literalist about their idioms.

Anyhow...what's the history of these phrases? The OED has American caught dead from 1870 and American seen dead in 1887, then a Scottish-authored found dead in 1923, followed by British seen deads in the 1930s. So it's likely it started in the US, but then got translated a bit in UK.

from the OED

Other 'be caught ADJECTIVE' phrases are also more American. (In this corpus result, the Token 1 column is number of hits in the US corpus, and the Token 2 column is UK).

As well as caught unaware, there's the more frequent caught unawares (which might not have been tagged as an adjective in the corpus, leading to its absence from the chart above). Another AmE caught expression is caught short:

from the OED

So, generally, caught is used with adjectives to describe being in a situation you're not prepared for. With a noun, we also have caught by surprise (more than 2x more US hits in GloWbE).

But not all caught + adjective phrases with connotations of unreadiness are more American. Caught red-handed has more UK hits in the GloWbE corpus (less than 2x more), and that makes sense since red-handed is from Scotland in the early 1800s. (The red is the blood of the person you've just murdered.) That's a more literal caught, though—being caught by the police (or someone).

*I've only really just appreciated that anything that looks bold when I'm in the blogger editor doesn't look bold when the post is published—at least not on my browser. So, I'm going to start putting bold things in another colo(u)r just to underscore the difference. If anyone wants to give me a tip on how to retroactively change the font across the blog to make the bolds stand out more, please let me know via gmail (lynneguist).

tips, dumps, fly-tipping, fly-posting, post no bills

2025-08-10T13:05:00.003+01:00

On my way home from work, I pass the windowless side of an end-of-terrace house, on which this sign is posted:

Such signs are a common sight in England, and not immediately transparent to AmE speakers, who are more accustomed to 'No dumping' signs:

from SmartSign.com

(There's more we could say about these signs, but we haven't got space for that right now. For more on NO TRESPASSING, see this old post on AmE POSTED signs.)

The Brighton sign is an official local-government sign, while anyone can buy those US examples. The equivalent anyone-can-buy it signs in the UK might have both the terms tipping and dumping:

from morelock.co.uk

Tipping (first cited UK early 1800s), like dumping, relates to tipping, and thereby releasing, the contents of a truck or cart into an area for waste, hence BrE tip for what AmE would call dump: a (probably official) place where the waste from a particular area can be left (for processing, piling up, burial, etc.). The verb dump ('to fall with sudden force') goes back to Middle English, but it's only in the late 1700s, in the US, that it starts to be used transitively to refer particularly to getting rid of waste. (See this old post for more on AmE dumpster. See the comments of this old post for discussion of dump truck.)

Tipping or dumping could be legal, but fly-tipping is specifically 'illegal dumping'. Why fly? It's not to do with the insects that inevitably follow illegal dumping. It's the fly in the expression on the fly: that is, in motion or 'on the wing'. Dumping/tipping that is "on the fly" is without prior arrangement and probably surreptitious. You're taking a load of waste away from where it's not needed, and you just leave it someplace that is conveniently unobserved. The term fly-tipping is first noted by the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1960s, and the back-formed verb fly-tip only comes up in the 1980s.

On the fly developed different uses in BrE and AmE in the mid-1800s. In BrE it could be a slang term for begging (or committing crimes) while moving about/around town. (See Green's Dictionary of Slang.) With that extension, fly-tipping makes some sense as a term for an illegal activity. In AmE, on the fly became a description of a baseball that's been hit, but has not yet touched the ground—so you want to catch the other team's ball on the fly. (The term fly ball comes some decades later, as a result.)

fly-posting

If you know that fly-tipping is illegally dumping waste "on the fly", then it's easier to see what BrE fly-posting means: putting up posters on the move—all over town. (Often, but not necessarily, illegally.) If you don't make the on the fly connection, you might think it's about posting (orig. AmE) flyers (late 1800s). But since flyer also comes from that same 'quickly, while moving' sense of fly, you're not far off.

From a Brighton & Hove News article "Council brings in new rules to tackle flyposting and stickering"

An earlier term for this is bill-sticking (late 1700s, esp. in 1800s), which one occasionally still sees in the UK, especially the agentive noun bill-sticker. We rarely call flyers or posters bills or handbills these days, but that's what they were from the late 1700s and into the 20th century.

While it's possible to find uses of fly-posting in the US, it's a much rarer term there. Instead of signs saying No Flyposting you might see a stencil(l)ed Post No Bills.

(From Alex Westerman's essay about POST NO BILLS in New York City.)

For a while, it was funny to post pictures of Bills next to such stencils (or to add one's own):

from Pittsburgh Orbit

(This calls to mind my earlier post on POSTED signs in the US, also linked-to above. And my post re bills versus notes. Neither of these is terribly related to the issues in this post, but, hey, someone might be wondering.)

Another bill/Bill joke, seen in UK and Australia, responds to No Bill Posters signs.

from Bill Posters Soundcloud

While you don't tend to see POST NO BILLS in the UK now, it does seem to have been used in the UK in the early 20th century. I've found a couple of these signs (now sold) on auction sites:

From GWRA auctions

An AmE informal term for (often illegal) postering is wheatpasting, after the paste used to fasten the posters so that they cannot be easily removed.

the fine/small print

2025-07-13T19:47:00.007+01:00

Last month, Dave Mandl tagged me on this message on Bluesky:

I hadn't really reali{s/z}ed it either, till Dave pointed it out. But sure enough, it is the case. Here are a couple of screenshots from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, showing the fine print and the small print with a bit more grammatical context:

Before we get into the how, when, and where of this, let's start with the what. There are three uses of the fine/small print to sort out, which arose in this order:

the original, literal meaning: printed characters that small in dimension and (relatedly/therefore) light in line thickness, and therefore difficult to read

e.g. I can't read such small/fine print without my glasses.
the extended meaning the fine/small print: supplementary text to a contract or other document that expresses terms and conditions, typically printed in a small/light font

e.g. They hid the extra penalty fees in the small/fine print.
more figurative uses (again with the): important, technical/non-obvious information that one might not have paid attention to, but that might have serious repercussions.

e.g. "The fine print of what Obama is doing is far less dramatic than many of his defenders and critics claim." (Cedar Rapids, IA Gazette, quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary)

In the literal sense 1, the OED has examples of small print all the way back to the 1500s; fine print only appears in 1761. All the first citations are from England, but all their examples of fine print from the 1850s onward are American.

In the extended sense 2 (from what evidence we have), the fine print shows up first—in an American case-law reporter in 1891. The small print is first found in a yachting manual published in London in 1900.

It's hard to say when these expressions got more figurative. The OED only gives a separate figurative sense 3 for fine print (first example, 1948) with just "also figurative" at sense 2 for small print. It's a bit annoying that the two are treated differently, but it appears to be because the figurative examples of fine print in AmE are just more figurative. In the 'figurative' fine print examples, like the Obama one above, we're looking at deeds rather than words. But the not-really-about-print examples of sense 2 for small print involve language (if not print), as in this example from the Telegraph:

1971
Some interest attaches therefore to the ‘small print’ of the Queen's speech and how far it avoids firm undertakings on some of the more controversial measures.

So, to sum up, it looks like, for some reason, AmE liked the phrase fine print more than small print for the literal stuff, and then it added an extended meaning relating to contractual language. You can see the frequency of the phrase rising as it gets more uses—and the neglect of small print in the Corpus of Historical American English:

Then after the meaning was extended, it looks like it was calqued into BrE—which is to say BrE took the idea and put it into the more familiar phrasing small print.

I wondered whether there were broader differences in the use of fine in its 'slim, delicate' linear senses in AmE and BrE. I found a few things, but they don't add up to much of a picture:

fine line: consistently more AmE than BrE hits in singular
fine lines and wrinkles: This phrase had 3x more hits in BrE than AmE in GloWbE (2012–13), but only about 1/3 more in the more recent News on the Web (NoW) corpus. It's strongest in Hong Kong/Singapore/Malaysia, though, so maybe it originated in advertising in Asia?
draw a fine line between (two similar things): The OED's first example of that is BrE in 1848; the GloWbE corpus now has more US examples than UK, but the numbers are very small.
fine-tip, fine-point (of a pen, etc.): much more AmE in GloWbE and NoW. (The number of hits for fine nib were tiny, but more in BrE. Fine-nibbed pen had more in AmE.)

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balk and baulk

2025-06-10T05:41:00.003+01:00

Over on Bluesky last month, I was pulled into a conversation that went something like this:

Someone tweets a screenshot of a comment with the phrase Do you baulk at the film reviews...?
Someone American asks "how long have y'all been adding a u to balk?"
And then, predictably, some respondents say it's always been there, Noah Webster took it out.

That's the point where someone (c'est moi!) looked into it and reported back:

The Oxford English Dictionary has it as balk. Since it comes from Old English, it only got a 'u' after French had influenced (I am tempted to say 'infected') the spelling system. The 'u' came into the word in the 1600s and 1700s, and today the spelling is very mixed in BrE. British National Corpus has 21 baulked/13 balked, more recent Corpus of Global Web-Based English has 71 baulked/93 balked in BrE. Cambridge, Chambers & Collins Dictionary all list balk first as does the Guardian Style Guide.

Most u/non-u variations in BrE and AmE involve an o—as in words like colo(u)r and mo(u)ld. The variation can probably be blamed on Samuel Johnson as much as Noah Webster. In the 18th-century, not all British dictionaries put a u in words like colo(u)r, but Johnson did, and his dictionary became far more famous than the others, so the u form eventually became standard in BrE. I write about the ou/o spellings at this old post (and much more and much better in in The Prodigal Tongue). But even Johnson spelled balk without the u.

My attention to the -o(u)- words in the book meant I overlooked balk/baulk—but I used the word balked in chapter 7:

...please seemed inappropriate in the small request situation, and so Americans balked at it.

The British copyeditor did not bat an eyelash—or a blue pencil—at it.

Given the dictionaries' agreement, we can say that balk is the "standard" spelling of the verb in BrE. Given the corpus numbers, we can say that it is the "normal" spelling. Given the word's history, we can say it is the "original" spelling.

But those corpus numbers aren't so distinct, and given the conversation on Bluesky, it seems that some BrE writers really want to spell it with a u (and to believe that that is the "standard/normal/original" way to spell it). This may well be another instance of British spelling changing in recent decades in order to fight against perceptions but not realities of a British/American spelling difference.*

Confusion about its spelling is understandable, though, since there is a noun that is more usually spelled/spelt baulk. It's part of a billiard-type game table, and the term is used in several terms in several such games.

Illustration from International 8 Ball Referee

I searched for several of these terms as either balk or baulk in Corpus of Global Web-Based English and got only the u spelling—with none of them in AmE:

(Britannica.com has it as balk. They're owned by the same company as Merriam-Webster. Is the ghost of Noah W. removing U's in the encyclop[a]edia?)

So, in general, if it's a [billiards] noun, it's baulk and if it's a verb it's balk. They both come from the same Old English word, with a Germanic ancestor.

The one other -aulk word in current English is caulk (used much more in AmE than BrE, which tends to say seal/sealant instead)—but that came into English with the u, as it came from French cauquer in the 1500s.

The post-Norman urge to stick a U in balk also affected talk and stalk in the 1600s, but not, apparently walk. For me, the mystery is: why has the urge to stick a U in persisted for baulk and not the others?

----

*I say 'another' instance of spelling change due to perceptions of 'Americanism' because I discuss the main instance of that phenomenon in detail in The Prodigal Tongue:

(And I'm going to leave that complicated situation/history for readers of the book. Or listeners to it!)

===POSTSCRIPT 12 APRIL 2026===

I can't imagine when I'll have enough billiards content to support another post, so I'm just going to slide this item in. The Wordle solution earlier this week was CAROM, a word I didn't know, though when I got thoroughly stuck, I managed to pull it from somewhere in my subconscious:

Neil W emailed me to point out that this is a billiards term, which appears to be more American. The OED says of the noun:

A stroke in Billiards; = carambole n. 2; now also called cannon n.1 III.11.

But the verb ('To strike or glance and rebound') they mark as American, and the Corpus of Global Web-Based English seems to bear this out:

tons, loads and heaps of

2025-05-12T00:26:00.009+01:00

Harry Enfield, Loadsamoney

I belong to a fantastic international writing group. There, last week, I presented a paragraph that included "tons of something" (I can't actually remember what the noun was). A New Zealander in the group commented, "I suppose we'd say heaps of."

Indeed. Here are some imprecise, informal ways of expressing 'large quantities of' in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. The darker the blue, the more characteristic that phrase is to that country:

Or, here's a better, but not as pretty way to report these results, as number of occurrences per million words. This makes the numbers comparable across countries (since the individual country corpora are not all the same size). Here are those figures for the three main expressions, with the numbers rounded.

expression	US	CA	GB	IE	AU	NZ
tons of	19	17	8	7	7	7
loads of	5	5	22	22	9	10
heaps of	1	1	1	1	10	11

This is saying, for instance, that the American corpus has tons of at a rate of 19 times per million words of running text. (For comparison, the phrase a lot of is around 300 times per million in each country's corpus.)

So, we can see that tons of is preferred in North America, loads of in the UK and Ireland, and Australia and New Zealand like heaps of but use loads of at nearly the same rate as heaps of.

Bunches of had less than 1 per million in all of the country corpora. It seems to be more often literal in all countries—lots of bunches of grapes, flowers, or asparagus, and a few bunches of people, websites, and, in one NZ example: "small bunches of noisy wowsers trying to tell everybody else how to live their lives."

I've only shown you the first six countries in the corpus results. After that, we get into Asian and African countries where English is spoken. Tons of dominates most of those—but, at least in the African nations, more of those tons of were literal tons of stuff, like rice or water. Of course, some of the tons in the other countries will be literal tons too—but the difference between North American and the UK/IE/AU/NZ seems to be due to the figurative usage—as in I have tons of friends/problems/blog posts.

The Oxford English Dictionary has not updated its entries for these words since their first publication, more than 100 years ago. But three of the four have been used for informal descriptions of large quantities since the 1600s, and the fourth is the most American one.

The informal usage of tons is not listed in the OED's 1913 entry for ton, though it does list several colloquial uses where ton means 100 (e.g. as a darts score or £100). The first use of tons of money in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) is not until the 1920s. Tons of stuff shows up in the 1940s. Neither of those phrases is used much for decades after that, but the informal use of tons picks up quickly after the 1980s. In the COHA corpus (1800–, the top nouns after tons of are coal, steel and water, while in GloWBE (2013) they are money, people and carbon.

And that, my friends, is the shortest blog post I've written in a long time! I await bunches of comments!

PS: Maybe I should have done singulars as well as plurals, but I was worried about singular versions infecting the data. But when I checked the first 20 a bunch of, only one was literal, so maybe not:

And, of course, I should have looked up the BrE spelling tonne, but there are fewer of those:

And sh*load(s) of has come up in the comments, so you can see here that shedload is pretty British:

PPS: Over on Bluesky, Graham Burton shared some relevant tables with data from the British National Corpus, from his co-authored book The Big Beasts of English Grammar

Anglo-Saxon

2025-04-19T13:19:00.002+01:00

The first thing that made me want to write about Anglo-Saxon was my experience of French exchange students using the term to mean 'anglophone, English-speaking'. I'd warn them against the term, stating (but perhaps not explaining) that it is inaccurate and has connotations they didn't intend in British/American English. (So here comes the explanation.) The second thing is that I've been writing about the history of English and have chosen to mostly refer to Anglo-Saxon rather than Old English and I'm thinking about that choice. The third thing is that Dave Wilton (who writes the fantastic Word Origins newsletter) published a paper in 2020 on the topic that's been on my TBR pile for a while—so writing this post provided me with an excuse to take the time for it.

Anglo-Saxon v Old English

Let me address my second thing first: Why would I want to call the Germanic pre-Norman conquest language/dialects of Britain (5th–11th century) Anglo-Saxon when the name Old English feels more transparent? It's English! But it's Old!

It's that transparency that I want to resist. The name Old English makes it sound like it's the same language as we speak, just an older form. But we really have to question whether it is the same language at all. Yes, I would count Modern English as a Germanic language derived from that previous language, but the fallout of the Norman conquest so thoroughly changed English that it stopped being 'the same language'. The grammar is different, the vocabulary is different, the pronunciation is unfamiliar, the words that have survived often mean very different things today. As this Tiktoker says, you don't need footnotes, you need a translation:

Confusingly, it's common to hear people refer to old English (or Old English?) in reference to Shakespearean English—or even Dickensian. The film director Robert Eggers, whose forthcoming film Werwulf is in Middle English, has been fighting a battle against this kind of misuse:

So, just to be clear, here are the periods of English, as usually defined:

ca. 450AD/CE to 1150ish: Old English/Anglo-Saxon.
from the Germanic invasions till the start of Middle English. This can be further divided into prehistoric (450–650), early (650–900) and late periods (900–1150). Beowulf is the most famous literary work from this time.
1066 to 1500ish: Middle English
from the Norman (French) invasion through the Great English Vowel Shift. This also has early and late periods. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is the most famous bit.
1500ish to 1650ish: Early Modern English
Shakespeare times. King James Bible times.
1650ish to now: Late Modern English
No more thou, no more hath, and lots more vocabulary thanks to industriali{s/z}ation and the spread of English worldwide.

The dates should be taken as severely "mushy," since change spread gradually through the Anglosphere—or through England and the British Isles, the limits of the Anglosphere for most of its history.

So, that's one use of Anglo-Saxon: to refer to the people, culture or language of the Germanic-speaking people of Britain before the 12th century. That's the most straightforward meaning.

Anglo-Saxons = English speakers?

But the Anglo-Saxons didn't call themselves Anglo-Saxon. That term didn't arrive till the 1600s. And it didn't get much traction until the 19th century. Here's a bit I wrote about it in The Prodigal Tongue:

At the height of the British Empire, English intellectuals were taken with the notion of an “Anglo-Saxon race”, tracing its roots to the Germanic peoples who settled in Britain after the Romans left in the 5th century. With self-satisfaction they concluded that their “race” was something special, illustrated by the strength of their culture over that of the conquered Celts, their early codification of individual rights with the Magna Carta in 1215, and their break with the Roman church in the 16th century. Belief in their own good example made appropriating other peoples’ lands much easier to justify – and Americans of English stock were happy to share in this myth. But by the 20th century, talk of an Anglo-Saxon race had fallen out of fashion, and instead of genetic inheritance, it was language that seemed to unite us.

Thus we started to be called the English-speaking peoples, a term used with particular influence by two statesmen-historians, Theodore Roosevelt in The Winning of the West and Winston Churchill in A History of the English-speaking Peoples. President and prime minister turned to this language-based description of “our peoples” because other possible descriptions had become impossible.

My French students were still using the Anglo-Saxon race to refer to 'the English-speaking peoples'. One problem in using the term that way is that "races" allegedly have a common genetic heritage, and English-speakers don't. Many Americans cannot trace their ancestry back to England. We are a transatlantic linguistic group and we share some aspects of our cultures. But it's weird to call us a race in contemporary English.

I had a look in the French Web corpus in SketchEngine (frTenTen23) and found some examples of the French usage, just so you can see what I'm talking about (the blue bits are from Google Translate):

une politique audacieuse pour défendre la langue et la culture française qui se trouvent aujourd'hui particulièrement menacées par l'invasion de la langue anglaise et de la culture anglo-saxonne .
a bold policy to defend the French language and culture, which are today particularly threatened by the invasion of the English language and Anglo-Saxon culture.

L'hôpital a mis en place un concept qui vient des pays anglo-saxons nommé "Kids friendly".
The hospital has implemented a concept that comes from Anglo-Saxon countries called "Kids friendly".

cette brutale franchise, qui caractérisent la race anglo-saxonne .
that brutal frankness, which characterizes the Anglo-Saxon race.
Cette ardeur chrétienne est-elle particulière à la race anglo-saxonne ?
Is this Christian ardo(u)r peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon race?

The Anglo-Saxon race-ism

Meanwhile in the equivalent English corpus (enTenTen21), mentions of "the Anglo-Saxon race" are much more likely to be associated with white power movements and eugenics—a big reason I wanted to steer my French students away that phrase. For example:

"The new Constitution eliminates the ignorant Negro vote and places the control of our government where God Almighty intended it should be – with the Anglo-Saxon race ," John Knox, the president of the [Alabama] constitutional convention, said in a speech encouraging voters to ratify the document [in 1901] [source]
Galton declared that the "Bohemian" element in the Anglo-Saxon race is destined to perish, and "the sooner it goes, the happier for mankind." [source]

But this isn't a blog about French/English differences. It's a blog about differences in American and British English—and I had a feeling we'd find differences in how Anglo-Saxon is used in my two countries.

WASP

I first learned the term Anglo-Saxon as a child when I asked my mother about the AmE term Wasp or WASP. The OED's first citation for that term comes from a sociology journal in 1962:

For the sake of brevity we will use the nickname 'Wasp' for this group, from the initial letters of ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestants’.

The OED notes that the term is "originally and chiefly U.S." and "frequently derogatory." The Anglo-Saxon in Wasp is meant to distinguish certain white Americans: not the Irish, nor the Scots-Irish, not the Germans, not the Poles... When I hear Wasp I think (NAmE) "old money", members of Daughters of the American Revolution, and people who claim to trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower.

It's hard to exclude the stinging insect when looking for Wasp in a corpus, but White Anglo-Saxon Protestant(s) occurs about five times per decade in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) between 1960 and 2000, and not at all in this century. That's not to say it's dead: there are 11 uses in AmE in the (much larger) Corpus of Global Web-Based English, collected in 2012–3. According to the News on the Web corpus, that was a stand-out year for white Anglo-Saxon protestant(s). The graph shows worldwide numbers. It occurs 8.7 times per million words in the American news corpus and 3.6 times per million in the British, usually in stories about the US.

Three uses of Anglo-Saxon in American and British corpora (Wilton 2020)

We've seen a few meanings of Anglo-Saxon here, and that's what Wilton investigates in his paper by going deeper into a number of corpora:

Wilton, David. 2020. What Do We Mean By Anglo-Saxon? Pre-Conquest to the Present. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 119.425–454. doi:10.5406/jenglgermphil.119.4.0425.

Writing for philologists, he's concerned that trends in how the term is used in general English might be bad for use of the term in medieval studies. (For what it's worth, BrE style guides these days prefer medieval over mediaeval.) Here, I'm concerned just with whether there's a difference between British and American usage, what that's about, and whether there's risk of miscommunication between AmE & BrE.

Wilton tracks three uses of Anglo-Saxon:

Pre-Conquest: referring to the Germanic peoples of Britain before 1066
Politicocultural: "references to the politics, economics, and culture of present-day Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and especially the transnational characteristics that these nations share that are not explicitly ethnic or physiognomic." (p. 433) So: like the French usage above.

Ethnoracial: "any use of Anglo-Saxon that is applied to an individual person; that refers to physiognomy, personal appearance, DNA or genetics or ancestry; or that contrasts Anglo-Saxon with another ethnic or racial group, as well as instances of the phrase white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and the acronym WASP." (p. 433)

Using those three categories, Wilton analy{s/z}ed use of Anglo-Saxon in the COHA corpus:

He notes the increase around the turn of the 20th century, when "immigration from Southern Europe peaked, Jim Crow laws were instituted, lionization of the Confederacy and the 'lost cause' began, and membership in the Ku Klux Klan reached its height" but that the use is still mostly not making reference to Anglo-Saxons as a "race" with physical characteristics at this point (p. 443). He supposes that this might be because whiteness is such a default at this time in American thinking that there's less need to be racially specific. The Ethnoracial usage becomes dominant after 1970, in a period that, Wilton notes, is marked by "white flight" to the suburbs. (By 1970, immigration laws had liberalized and there had been a "Great Migration" of African Americans from the rural south to northern urban cent{er/re}s.)

There is no British equivalent to the COHA corpus (a real shame), so Wilton had a look in the parliamentary record to see British use of Anglo-Saxon in the same period. It's not (as he acknowledges) a fair comparison, but it is interesting:

He notes that the ethnoracial uses in parliament are mostly about distinguishing the English from the Irish, Welsh and Scots at the national level. I want to know: why are British parliamentarians talking about ancient times so much in the 70s and 80s? I had a quick dip in to the corpus and found reference to Anglo-Saxon law and Anglo-Saxon hoards. It could be that Old English or other descriptors were used more before—but it also looks like there were various arch(a)eological finds post-1970 that might have led to more discussion of antiquities in parliament. But I don't really know.

Moving on to more recent times, here's what Wilton found in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA):

Ethnoracial usage dominates.

Again, we don't have a good comparison corpus for British English, but the findings from the British National Corpus (texts from 1980–93) look like this:

Wilton followed up with the News on the Web corpus, which is more comparable across countries, comparing two short periods in each, 2012–13 and 2017–18.

(As you can see, he's also analy{s/z}ed Canada, which has its own patterns, and which I'm not covering here because that's not my beat. But do follow up with Wilton's paper if you're interested.)

So both countries have all the uses, but the UK has a lot more Pre-Conquest usage, which is not at all surprising, since you run into Pre-Conquest things in the place that was conquered—less so in the place later conquered by some people from the place that was conquered.

More notable is the division of ethnoracial versus politicocultural usage in the two countries.

In Britain, there's either even (BNC, 1980–93) distribution of ethnoracial and politicocultural or lots more politicocultural (NOW, 2010s). Wilton writes:

One might have expected an increase in the ethnoracial uses of “Anglo-Saxon” [in the UK] since the advent of the Brexit era, but the data shows this not to be the case. Any impression otherwise is probably due to increased awareness of ethnoracial uses of the term. In other words, people are only now noticing the uses that have always been there or are now reading ethnic connotations into the term that they had not before.

Wilton goes on to show that politicocultural interpretations dominate in other English-speaking nations, except the US and Canada, where the proportion of ethnoracial uses is around half of total uses and seems to be increasing.

In The Prodigal Tongue, I quote the late Guardian columnist Simon Hoggart:

A wise American reporter based in London once told me that every British news story is, deep down, about class. Every American story, he said, is about race.

Our linguistic differences often support that impression.

So, in terms of mutual understanding, I would expect that Americans seeing BrE use of Anglo-Saxon might easily take an ethnoracial impression where a politicocultural one is intended, since AmE use is heavily skewed toward that meaning and vice versa. The differences between these two uses are sometimes hard to pick apart—Wilton acknowledges that he sometimes found ambiguity in his data and needed to pick a side for the analysis. And that makes them even more apt to fly under our "semantic difference radar".

recipe verbs

2025-03-17T15:06:00.007+00:00

When I first moved to the UK, I hungrily watched the (orig. AmE) tv in my sublet apartment/flat in an attempt to acculturate myself. I can't remember if it was on an ad(vert) or on an early series of The Naked Chef, but I clearly remember the sentence:

Just bung it under the grill!

I already knew grill (=AmE broiler) from my time in South Africa. It was bung (meaning something like 'put forcibly, carelessly') that struck me. It seemed such an unattractive word, and yet it was being used about some food that was supposed to be wonderful after the bunging. Was this telling me something about British attitudes to food and cooking? Was it supposed to make the dish-making seem so sloppy anyone could do it? The questions clearly stuck in my mind, because the phrase has stayed with me for 25 years.

Bung was the first thing to come to mind when Maryellen Macdonald wrote to me:

You have a long post about cooking word differences, but I don’t think it contains a discussion of “add” vs. “tip”. US recipes say things like “add the carrots” to the pan, whereas UK recipes say “tip in the carrots”. My husband, the better cook in the household, asked me, “What do they mean tip the carrots? They’re cut up!” Hmm, maybe this little observation-ette isn’t quite sufficient for a post, but, perhaps you can use it somewhere.

I'm not sure which cooking-word difference post she was thinking of, since there are LOTS of them. But it made me think about "recipe verbs". Words like bung and tip are not necessarily cooking words—you can bung or tip a lot of things. But they are the kinds of words one finds in recipes or cooking programmes/shows.

I started asking my friends for other recipe-verb differences they had noticed. One friend (thanks, David!) pointed me to this parody cooking series, Posh Nosh, in which Richard E. Grant and Arabella Weir are minor aristocracy with an upscale restaurant brand. This particular nine-minute episode includes many great (fake) cooking verbs, instructing you to interrogate (clean?) then later to thrill open your mussels, to pillage some bones and to "gently gush [some AmE broth/BrE stock] until it completely obsesses the rice."

My friends weren't great at coming up with verb differences. (Several nouns were suggested.) Thank you to Ben, Björn, David, Jason, Michèle, Wendi for their suggestions. To complement these, I ended up doing an Advanced Search in the Oxford English Dictionary for region-marked cooking verbs. This post then got stupidly long and AmE biased; the OED is not good at marking words that are general to British English but not to North American.

For the following, I am marking things as AmE or BrE if either the OED or corpus results fairly firmly put the verb on one side of the Atlantic or the other. But you might know some of the "the other country's" words, especially if you ingest a lot of recipes and cooking programmes/shows. These things have been moving rapidly with mass media.

Some actual cooking verbs

Let's get the actual cooking verbs out of the way—some of these I've written about before:

AmE broil v BrE grill is (part of) the topic one of my first blog posts. Also:

AmE charbroil = cook over charcoal (not very frequent, more common in the modifier form charbroiled)
AmE panbroil = cook [meat/fish] in pan with very little fat

AmE grill v BrE toast comes up in a long post about cheese sandwiches (BrE toasties)
AmE grill v BrE barbecue comes up in a post from the 4th of July
orig. AmE nuke & zap: (informal) to microwave
orig. AmE pot-roast: to slow-cook meat (esp. beef) in a covered pot/dish
orig. AmE stir-fry (but this has been in BrE for most of your lifetimes)
AmE plank: From OED: "Originally and chiefly North American. To prepare (meat, fish, etc.) by cooking it on a board over an open fire; (in later use) to cook on a board in an oven"
AmE shirr: to poach (e.g. an egg) in cream rather than water. (I knew the word, but not what it meant!)
orig. AmE flip: Not really a recipe verb, but...from the OED:

transitive. Originally and chiefly U.S. To cook (items of food) by turning over on a hotplate, grill, or griddle. Now typically with the implication that the subject has a job in a fast-food restaurant (chiefly in to flip burgers).

Some verbs that are often used to modify food words

roast v roasted (of potatoes, chickens, etc.)—that post also mentions corn/corned beef, which has another post.
skim v skimmed (of milk)
minced/ground
mashed & smashed: I've written about mashed potato(es), which BrE can call just mash (now we're back into nouns). A related AmE verbal adjective is smashed. In the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (2013), North Americans have the collocation smashed potato(es); there are none in the British data. The distinction between mashed and smashed is that a smashed potato is less thoroughly mashed—it will still have some (orig. AmE) chunks of potato in it—and may well include the potato skins.

These days, you definitely see smashed on BrE menus—sometimes in front of potato but much more often in front of avocado. This Google ngrams graph shows that smashed avocado (blue line) surpassed mashed avocado (green line) in UK books around 2019, but the phrase has not taken off in the US (red line) in the same way, where people just talk about avocado toast without an adjective. (You hear that in BrE too, but it's not as prominent as in AmE.)

Verbs of placing

These are the ones we started with here. They're needed in recipes, but not exclusive to them:

BrE bung: to put forcibly, without delicacy. It's very informal word, but that goes with the vibe of a lot of British cooking shows. The closest equivalents are probably stick or throw (both General English), as in stick/throw it in the oven/pan, but bung feels the most informal and dismissive of the bunch. Here are some Google Image results for "bung it in the oven", which show the phrase applied to simple, quick recipes and the people who cook them:

BrE tip in means, essentially 'pour in', but it's often used for solids. It can apply to chopped carrots, as in Maryellen's example, because you're assumed to be tipping the chopping board over the pan and 'pouring' the carrots in. The magazine that just came with my grocery order has tip in its first two recipes: bread dough is tipped onto a floured surface. Cooked spinach is tipped into a sieve.
add: Mrs Redboots suggested this one. Add is General English, of course, but she notes a different usage:

American on-line cooks "add" ingredients to an empty pan. Can you add something when there is nothing there?

pop: British people are always popping—popping in, popping out, popping to the shops—so I suspected that pop it in the oven would also show up as more BrE, but no. It looks like General English in the GloWbE corpus. Google Books has pop it in the oven becoming more common after the 1990s, with BrE use of the phrase overtaking American from 2014.

AmE does seem to like to pop open various things, and BrE doesn't so much. This can include food/drink packaging (pop open a beer), but is often used of doors, the (BrE) bonnet/(AmE) hood or (BrE) boot/(AmE) trunk of a car, etc. Pop probably deserves it own post someday.

Verbs of mixing and cutting

In my experience, British kitchens are more likely to have (more AmE) immersion blenders / (more BrE) hand blenders / (slightly more BrE stick blenders) and American ones to have hand(-held) mixers (BrE also electric whisks). But I only go in the kitchens of those I know, so maybe that's quite biased. It would make sense, though, since UK soups are much more likely to be purées and, until the advent of the Great British Bake-Off, it seemed to me that Americans did more cake-baking (often with mixes, but still—using a mixer).

(BrE) blitz: It sounds a bit slangy, but blitz is nearly the standard verb in BrE for using a blender, especially for short blasts—to the extent that some people call any kind of blender a blitzer. (I did not succeed in finding out how common this is, because the data is overrun with people named Blitzer and sports blitzers, etc.). Blitz looks like it might be making it into US website recipes.
a wooden reamer
whisk: This is general English, but only in BrE (and rarely) have I seen it used to refer to the action of using an electric mixer (with whisk-y attachments). It's thus used a lot more in UK recipes.
beat [added 18 Mar 25]: I am looking at two cook(ery) books now, and see that Americans are always beating their ingredients where British bakers are whisking them. Neither word is particular to one nationlect, but the rates of usage seem quite different. (Click for an ngram of beat the eggs.)
(orig. AmE) rice to press through a holey surface or mesh to create very small pieces; some people have special ricers for this. Especially used with boiled potatoes to make mashed potato(es).
(AmE) pull: to "stretch and draw" a mixture (usually AmE taffy) until it is aerated and ready to set. OED has this as "chiefly" AmE.

And then there is the pull in pulled pork, pulled chicken, etc. OED has this as "chiefly U.S. in the late 20th century" (but it seems to have come back to the UK with US-style pulled pork).
(AmE) ream to juice a citrus fruit, using a device that you twist in the halved fruit.

Verbs of baking/pastry

frost/ice: See this old post.
(BrE) knock up (a crust): to seal and finish the crusts of a pie. (Here's an online discussion of it.) This is no doubt related to uses of the phrase in other crafts. Here's the first OED sense definition for knock up:

To drive upwards, or fasten up, by knocking; spec. in Bookbinding, etc. to make even the edges of (a pile of loose sheets) by striking them on a table; in Bootmaking, to cut or flatten the edges of the upper after its attachment to the insole.

AmE knock up is a more general expression for 'prepare quickly'. So if you knock up a pie (or a three-course meal or anything else) in AmE, that's talking about the whole process of preparing it, from start to finish.

proof / prove In BrE, you prove dough and (traditionally) in AmE you proof it (unless you've watched lots of GBBO).

Verbs of preserving

can v tin/bottle: Say you have tomatoes that you blanch and put into jars for use later in the year, in AmE that would be canning even though the tomatoes are going into a glass jar. You could also talk about canning if you were putting things in a jar to pickle, I think—it's just our general word for what to do when you have a glut of some fruit or vegetable that needs saving for later. The OED suggests tin (for putting things in metal containers) and bottle as BrE equivalents, but I think maybe for putting things in jars more general-English words like preserve and pickle might be more used? (Let us know in the comments.) Bottle would be used in AmE if you were putting things, like sauces or liqueurs, into bottles, but not usually for jars.

Verbs of meat preparation

French: this one (not in my vocabulary) I got from the OED:

transitive. Cookery (now chiefly U.S.). To prepare a joint by partially separating the meat from the bone and removing any excess fat.

tenderize orig. AmE, but has been in BrE since the 1970s

I'm sure you'll be able to think of some I've missed. Please add them in the comments!

-ed versus -t

2025-02-09T21:54:00.020+00:00

Ben Yagoda (Friend of SbaCL and Not One-Off Britishisms blogger), who had recently noticed a US journalist saying learnt instead of learned, asked whether I'd covered the ‑ed/‑t alternation. It's one of those things that I've been putting off for a long time because it would be a very long post. Now I've been shamed out of my laziness.

In order to do this in any kind of sensible way, I feel like I need to explain some things about the past tense in English. I'll try to introduce terms gently, with links to sites with deeper explanations. At points I will be a bit sloppy and use more familiar (and less precise) terms (like past-tense). And I'm going to be very sloppy about phonetic spelling, both because not everyone knows the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and because if I tried to use the IPA we'd have to get into not-especially-relevant differences in pronunciation of many of these words.

The origins of ‑ed

Let's start by thinking a bit more about ‑ed. Old English had different categories of verbs that were put into past tense (preterite) in various ways. The so-called strong verbs were those that changed their internal vowel. Some of those are still 'strong' in Modern English, like drink/drank and write/wrote.

Those that ended with the (then multiple) suffixes that would eventually become ‑ed are weak verbs. They don't undergo an internal change to make past tense; a suffix is just stuck on the end.

Nowadays, we think of strong verbs as "irregular verbs" and ‑ed verbs as "regular" verbs, but back in Old English the verbs that we now think of as "irregular" fell into regular patterns in a more complex system.

For centuries, English has been bending toward verb weakness. Many Old English "strong" verbs are now made past-tense with ‑ed, like starved (rather than something like storve) and baked (not boke).

But ‑ed is only the spelling of the past-tense suffix

We tend to think of ‑ed as the past-tense suffix because it's how it tends to be represented in spelling. That spelling makes it look like it has two sounds, but a common lesson in English Linguistics 101 is that spelling is misleading. Notice how we pronounce ‑ed in the following words:

stopped, stoked, passed, slashed, torched = "stopt", "stokt", "past", "slasht", "torcht"
strobed, flogged, buzzed, judged, blamed, pinged = "strobd", "flogd", "buzzd", "judjd", "blamd", "pingd"

That is, each of these past tense forms is pronounced with one syllable. The ‑ed does not represent a vowel+consonant combination. Buzzed isn't "buzz-ed", it's "buzzd".

If you don't hear the difference between those, think about learned in these two contexts:

I learned a fact versus a learned scholar

The first has one syllable ("lernd"), the second as two distinct syllables with a distinct vowel in the ‑ed. That two-syllable learnéd (sometimes spelled/spelt with the accent mark) is a special case; it's an adjective, rather than a verb. We're going to stick to verbs, not adjectives in this post, but that adjective is handy for illustrating what we're not doing in words like buzzed. We're not pronouncing a vowel in ‑ed.

Some other ‑ed verbs do have a pronounced vowel in ‑ed:

tasted, boarded, dated, padded, minded: each has two syllables.

If you start from the spelling, you might think that buzzed is buzz+ed and the E has got(ten) lost. But language doesn't start from spelling, it starts from sounds. Instead of the suffix being ‑ed, with some weird places where the vowel is dropped, it makes more linguistic sense to see the suffix as ‑d and to observe that we have rules for what to do when that [d] rubs up against other sounds in pronunciation. The rules are:

The [voiced] -d becomes [voiceless] ‑t when it follows a voiceless consonant sound. (We say it assimilates to voicelessness. Assimilation makes things easier to say quickly.)
A vowel is inserted (epenthesized) when we try to attach the suffix ‑d to a /t/ or a /d/ sound. These consonants are pronounced by tapping the gum ridge behind the teeth with the tip of your tongue (they're alveolar plosives). and if we tried to pronounce them together, you'd not be able to hear them both. (In English, we would pronounce padd the same as pad.) So, inserting the vowel makes the doubled alveolar consonants pronounceable for the speaker and hearable for the listener.
In all other cases, the suffix remains ‑d in pronunciation.

Because we follow rules when we pronounce all those variants of -(e)d and nothing else changes, those are very regular verb endings. Notice that nothing major changes in the verb root. The a in taste is the same as the a in tasted, and the o in stop is the same as the o in stopped, etc. In the irregular verbs discussed below, that's not always the case.

This all means means that the difference between learnt and learned is very small: just the difference between saying the [t] sound and saying the [d] sound. We're not saying more sounds if we say the version that's got more letters.

Late addition: Marianne Hundt reminds me that things are not always straightforward—there can be back and forth between regularization and irregularization in the timeline. What follows us just about where we are now.

t/d variation

Now we move to the ones that seem irregular in Modern English and whether they are the same in British and American English.

In each case, I've had a look at the Corpus of Global Web-Based English to see what percentage of the BrE/AmE usage is in the irregular form. So, where it says 98% in the first table for bent, it means that 98% of the examples are bent and 2% are bended. I've rounded all the percentages to the nearest whole number.

Here, I'm only worrying about irregulars with a -t marking the past tense. If you're interested in other irregular past-tense forms, I have some other blog posts for you.

final d > t (no vowel change)

British and American English don't differ in using these irregulars:

Base form	Past form	AmE %	BrE %
bend	bent	98*	98*
lend	lent	100	100
send	sent	100	100
spend	spent	100	100

While we have a pattern here of end>ent, it's not a regularity. No one says tent as the past tense of tend, or ent as the past of end. I haven't tried searching for rend/rent because I'd be overwhelmed by the 'lease' meaning of rent.

*Bended is like learnéd, in that it's used as a participial adjective (as in on bended knee). So, the 2% or so of bended are a different thing. As a verb, everyone's saying bent: I bent the rules, not I bended the rules.

-pt versus -ped with vowel change

Here we see AmE moving toward regularization for creep and leap, but not other rhyming verbs. Irregularity is easier to maintain in much-used verbs—we learn the irregular form because we hear it. When we go to make a past-tense for a verb we've heard less, we often have to make up a past-tense form on the spot, and that is most easily done with -ed. It's a bit surprising that wept is still so strong, considering it's the least-used of any of this set.

Base form	Past form	AmE %	BrE %
creep	crept	62	92
leap	leapt	52	79
sleep	slept	100	100
sweep	swept	100	100
weep	wept	99	98

These irregulars all have a vowel change in common: the -pt version has a "short E", while its -ed counterpart (creeped, sweeped) has a "long E"—even leapt, whose spelling seems to indicate otherwise.

This case is different from other possible -pt endings, like slipt and stript. Since slipt is how slipped is actually pronounced (see above), slipt/slipped is just a spelling difference, not an irregular verb issue. (They are also spelled/spelt with a 'd: slipp'd and stripp'd.) The numbers for these are so low that they would show up as 0 in the table, but there's an interesting detail about those tiny numbers: slipt is only present in the GB corpus (6 times), and stript is only in the US corpus (10 times).

-Nt versus -ned with vowel change

In these ones, a final nasal consonant is followed by the -t suffix. The irregular forms also have a vowel change: the -Nt version has a "short E", while its -ed counterpart (leaned) has a "long E".

AmE uses regulari{s/z}ed leaned, while BrE still mostly uses leant, but both have mostly regulari{s/z}ed dreamed, and no one is saying meaned.

Base form Past form AmE % BrE %
dream dreamt 16 33
lean leant 3 75
mean meant 100 100

Base form	Past form	AmE %	BrE %
dream	*dreamt*	16	33
lean	leant	3	75
mean	meant	100	100

I have to wonder if the loss of leant is related to its having homophones: lent, as a past tense of lend.

-rnt versus -rned

These have no vowel change. So, in spoken language, the difference is between saying burnt and burnd.

Base form Past form AmE % BrE %
burn burnt 23 42
earn earnt 0 3
learn learnt 4 44

Base form	Past form	AmE %	BrE %
burn	burnt	23	42
earn	earnt	0	3
learn	learnt	4	44

These are a little tricky because burnt is more common than burned as an adjective (e.g. burnt offerings), and as we've already seen, there are some funny things going on with learned as an adjective. But it's hard to trust that automatic processes for the corpus have accurately tagged the adjective use, so I haven't used that tagging to come to the numbers above. They include everything.

I had the feeling that these differ in preterit (I learnt French) and perfect (I have learnt French) forms. So, I searched for these in the formula "PRONOUN [has/have/had] VERB+ed/t". The numbers for BrE irregulars go down in this condition (I tried it with other pronouns too), which tells us something, but I haven't got time to look into what it tells us. (Given that we no longer have the risk of errant adjectival learneds, I expected the percentage to go up!)

Past form	AmE preterit	AmE perfect	BrE preterit	BrE perfect
burnt	17	21	33	39
learnt	3	6	31	36

So, I was right that there's more -rnt in the perfect than in the preterite, but it's a smaller gap than I'd thought I'd find.

-led versus -lt

Finally, the Ls, one of which you've seen already in this post: spelled/spelt.

These fall into two categories, with and without vowel change.

The vowel-changing ones are solidly in the "irregular" category, with a bit of movement in the rarest of those, kneel>knelt.

With vowel change	Past form	AmE %	BrE %
deal	dealt	100	100
feel	felt	100	100
kneel	knelt	85	89

We see some of the biggest differences between AmE and BrE in the non-vowel-changing ones—with some caveats about homonyms below.

Without vowel change	Past form	AmE %	BrE %
build	built	100	100
dwell	dwelt	86	83
smell	smelt	13	48*
spell	*spelt*	7	49†
spill	spilt	11	38^
spoil	spoilt	5	51

*Smelt is a bit tricky because it can be a verb in its own right (smelting metal) and it's also a fish that's eaten in North America. The corpus, however, is bad at distinguishing these things. The majority of smelts in the results reported here are the past tense of smell, but it would be too much work to tell you exactly how many.

†Spelt is another problem one because it is the name of a grain. I tried sorting out the noun uses from teh verb ones, but it turns out that most of the ones tagged as "noun" in the corpus are, in fact, instances of the verb. So the numbers here include all spelts.

^In the case of spilt, I wondered how much adjectival use mattered, particularly in the phrase "cry over spilled/spilt milk". So, I searched for "spilled/spilt milk" and found that Americans are pretty evenly split on spilled versus spilt in the phrase (36 hits vs 32), whereas in British English it was 76 versus 18 hits. Those spilt milks account for 14–18% of the spilt percentages above (which is to say, that phrase isn't adding much to the AmE/BrE difference).

miscellaneous irregulars

There are a few more irregulars-ending-in-t; these ones end in fricative sounds. But it's not worth saying much about them, since they're much the same in British and American English.

leave>left: Everyone uses the irregular for this one. Where leaved happens, it has to do with leaves (like on a tree or a table), not leaving.

vex>vext: The -t version is still playable in Scrabble, but the corpus tells us no one's using it in UK or US. I'm not even bothering to look for other verbs ending in x.

dress>drest: No one's using this one either! But...

bless>blest: We find a bit more of this one, since old-fashioned spellings are common in religious language, either because they're quoted from long-ago translated scripture or because they're styled to sound like scripture. Still, only 2% of the AmE "past" forms are blest and only 1% of the BrE. (I say "past" because a lot of them are probably adjectives.)

The moral of the story is...

While some -t spellings are more common in current BrE than in current AmE, it would be wrong to call them "the British spelling", with one exception: leant. There we have clear evidence of a transatlantic divide where the -t version is the firm majority in the UK and the -ed version is much preferred in the US.

In the other cases, there may be more preference for one or the other in US or UK, but the same forms have the majority/minority in both countries (at least in this corpus, which was collected 12 years ago). That is to say, you're much more likely to see spelt from a British writer than an American one, but an awful lot of British writers are writing spelled. Learnt will tell you that a document is almost certainly not American, but learned will not tell you that the writer isn't British—and so forth.

US-to-UK Word of the Year 2024: landslide

2024-12-31T18:01:00.000+00:00

I've been struck by the lack of election-related 2024 Words of the Year from the English dictionaries (for a list, see November's newsletter). So I am here to repair that with my US-to-UK Word of the Year:

landslide

...which was much-used in its figurative sense to describe the result of the UK election that ended 14 years of Conservative government.

some landslide headlines in UK media

Here's how it it's been showing up in British news sources:

landslide in UK sources in the NOW corpus

The 2017 peak relates to both discussion of political landslides and a number of literal ones, particularly a big one in China.

Though the Google Books data is not as up-to-date, it shows a general increase in the term in BrE, starting at the turn of the 20th century, but speeding up from the 1980s. (It's possible that has something to do with the 1975 hit song "Landslide" by the Anglo-American band Fleetwood Mac.) I'm not too worried about the dip in the 2000s. Most words I look up in Google ngrams dip in the 2000s for some reason.

landslide in UK publications in Google Books

The first OED citation for landslide (which it marks as "Originally U.S.") is from 1822; early citations are hyphenated, but the hyphen was soon lost. (That OED entry was updated in 2021.) The BrE word landslip, by comparison, dates back to at least the 1670s. While the OED marks landslip as 'also figurative' none of its examples are figurative uses (but that entry has not been updated since 1901; it is irregularly hyphenated into the 19th century). Here are the definitions:

landslide 1. The sliding down or subsidence of a large mass of earth, rock, etc.; a landslip; esp. a collapse of earth or rock from a mountain or cliff. Also figurative. 2. An overwhelming majority of votes for one party or candidate in an election; a victory achieved with such a majority.

landslip The sliding down of a mass of land on a mountain or cliff side; land which has so fallen. Also figurative and attributive.

While the 2024 peak in news usage is certainly due to the UK election, it's clearly not just the figurative meaning that's moved to the UK. Recent results for landslide on the BBC website are all about literal land moving—in the UK or in other countries.

In the last one there, the headline says landslip, but landslide is in the first line of the article.

To me, landslide sounds much bigger than landslip, and that might be reflected in the large in the former definition. Around here in the South of England, landslips occasionally close down rail travel between Brighton and London. In that case, it'll be that some earth has washed down from the slopes along the (BrE) railway line/(AmE) train tracks. There, I don't tend to hear landslide, and sure enough, those headlines tend to be about landslips.

In Google Books, landslide started showing up in UK publications in the early 20th century. Landslip has been going down, but it was not that high to begin with. That suggests that landslide is doing work that landslip wasn't doing—both metaphorical work and description of more catastrophic land movement. I note that the Aberfan disaster of 1966 is described by the British Geological Society as a landslide and an avalanche, but not as a landslip.

I suspect some readers won't have known that landslide was an Americanism. And you could ask: if it's been used in the UK for a century, maybe it shouldn't count as an Americanism. But it is American by birth, and even 12 years ago, the word was much more strongly American:

landslide in GloWbE corpus

Whether or not we continue to hear of electoral landslides, it's a fair bet there will be more environmental ones in the news. Landslide is likely to hang around in BrE. That doesn't mean it will necessarily boot out landslip. It's handy to have different words to represent the difference between disasters and inconveniences.

UK-to-US Word of the Year 2024: fortnight

2024-12-30T13:52:00.008+00:00

So much of the "news" this year was about female popular music stars. The year started with Beyonce going country, then Charlie XCX declared a brat summer (leading Collins dictionaries to declare brat their Word of the Year). Facebook keeps feeding me videos of Ariana Grande acting and interviewing, and an incredible number of my middle-aged (and beyond) friends went to see Taylor Swift. Album-of-the-year lists are filled with female solo artist megastars.

It is Ms Swift who gives us our UK-to-US Word of the Year:

fortnight

This is the title of the single she released in April, co-written by Jack Antonoff and featuring Post Malone. It has been nominated for Record of the Year in the 2025 Grammy Awards. Thank you to Helen Zaltzman for nominating the word!

The single's release has resulted in a leap in the word's occurrence in US news:

Ben Yagoda noticed US use of fortnight all the way back in 2012 on his Not One-Off Britishisms (NOOBs) blog. But as the above graph shows, it was not much more than a one-off then. Its last peak (in US usage) came in 2018. The game Fortnite was released in 2017 and took over the world in 2018. This seems to be unrelated to the fortnight surge, which seems to come from the news story about the Thai boys' football team rescued after two weeks trapped in a cave. US news outlets repeated sentences with the word fortnight from non-US news agencies, including Reuters. A fair proportion of the 2018 number are also from US versions of foreign-owned sources like The Guardian and Al Jazeera.

Since 2018, it's had more usage than before. To a point, that is because more non-US sources have US web presences—so for example, 2021's US fortnights include a lot of cricket commentary from The Hindu and Omicron-variant tracing in The Guardian. Nevertheless, there is evidence there of growing familiarity with the word in the US since 2018:

painfully losing to Bill Belichick and Brady over the past fortnight. [nfl.com, 21 Dec 2021]

Since their [Korean band BTS's] fortnight in L.A., which turned out to be a mere reprieve for artists and fans [Hollywood Reporter, 29 Dec 2021]

...as NYC is currently recording 3,761 daily Covid infections, a 55% increase in a fortnight [deadline.com, 10 Dec 2022]

By 2023, far more of the American fortnights seem to be homegrown. Many of those are about sport(s) and many of those are about European football (AmE: soccer). But a good few (like the nfl.com one above) are about US sports. It's possible that the sports pages, "a NOOBs hotbed" are the entry point for the current fortnight trend.

One could think that the sports connection is what made Swift aware of the term—but I think it's a word that poetically minded and well-travel(l)ed Americans would often know. So I'm not going to bet that the inspiration for the word use was Swift's involvement with an NFL player.

The song ends with some American geographical detail:

Thought of callin' ya, but you won't pick up'Nother fortnight lost in AmericaMove to Florida, buy the car you wantBut it won't start up till you touch, touch, touch me

It feels like the juxtaposition of fortnight and America is a nod to the unAmericanness of fortnight.

Linguistic Americanness/Britishness depends on how you define Americanism and Britishism. This one is British because it died out in the US, not because it was never used there. Its new American fame is a tiny drop compared to its early-US use:

We can be fairly certain that increased use of fortnight in twenty-first AmE is related to recent/current British usage rather than revival of previous American usage. I don't think today's sports pages and pop stars are getting fortnight from Benjamin Franklin.

Note that fortnight been going down-down-down in the UK too. British people are saying two weeks more than fortnight since around the 1970s:

Some people call that Americani{s/z}ation. I'm not so sure. It's not like two weeks is a phrase an English speaker would have to learn from Americans. It wasn't Americani{s/z}ation when English speakers stopped saying sennight (='seven nights', like fortnight = 'fourteen nights') in the 17th century in favo(u)r of one week or a week. It's just using another, more transparent expression that your language allows, and allowing the more old-fashioned-feeling one to fall away.

-----------------

At this point, I am not certain there will be a US-to-UK Word of the Year 2024. If you're reading this before I post one, you're still welcome to nominate!

beanie (hat)

2024-12-12T15:26:00.002+00:00

When I was growing up in New York State, a beanie was a silly kind of skull cap, mostly worn by young people. My high school gave away felt ones like this (though with different letters). At the time, it was a very retro/jokey thing to wear.

The word beanie is originally an Americanism, derived from bean (also originally AmE), a slang term for 'head'. The OED entry for beanie was written in 1972 and has not been updated since. All its examples hint at felt hats—not necessarily silly ones like the one in the picture, but small hats worn toward the back of the head:

At some point after I moved to the UK in 2000, I started noticing British folk using beanie for what I had called a winter hat, others call a stocking cap, and Canadians (and some Americans) would call a toque (or tuque). It's a knit(ted) hat that might be rolled up at the bottom. Soon after that, I started noticing Americans using beanie (in) this way. So I was never sure where this use of beanie had originated. Nevertheless, it's definitely the predominant sense of the word now.

Google Image Search results for beanie

For some reason, I was thinking about beanies yesterday, and so I tweeted about them on Bluesky (yes, I'm reclaiming the word tweet). Monika Bednarek, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, replied that she thought the knit(ted) hat usage was Australian. Aha!

Now, I have no access to Australian dictionaries, and as we've seen, the OED is out of date on this. On top of that, there's no option to look at Australian sources only in Google Books ngrams. But Wikipedia says:

In New Zealand and Australia, the term "beanie" is normally applied to a knit cap known as a toque in Canada and parts of the US, but also may apply to the kind of skull cap historically worn by surf lifesavers and still worn during surf sports.

The lifesaver's beanie is much more like the silly American school cap. This photo comes from a National Post article about Australian lifesavers choosing (some years ago) to continue to wear the hat despite it being "uncool".

But surfers seem to like to wear knit(ted) hats, so perhaps it was the association with surfing that transferred the meaning to the knit(ted) kind? Maybe? At any rate, it does look Australian in the 2013 Corpus of Global Web-Based English:

beanie in GloWbE

Since there are a lot of meanings of beanie (and use in proper names, like Beanie Baby), I checked again with kn* before beanie to capture knit(ted) beanies, and Australia still dominates:

kn* beanie in GloWbE

Now, whether the new use of beanie spread directly from Australia to both US and UK is another question. I suspect it probably travel(l)ed by many routes. Initially, it does look like the new use took off more quickly in the UK (around 2005), and it remains higher there.

But we don't know how many of those hits are about Beanie Babies or other uses of the word. So here it is again with knit or knitted before beanie. The difference in acceleration of the term is no longer evident, though BrE still uses it more than AmE.

The first ngram graph also shows beanie hat in greater numbers in the UK than in the US. This is also true in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English:

This falls into a pattern with goatee beard and chocolate brownie, where originally AmE words are sometimes two-word compounds in BrE, presumably because the addition of an 'old' word helps people to interpret the less-familiar word.

So, an Americanism turned Australianism which was then populari{s/z}ed in US and UK. If English is any one thing, then it is a mutant.

in (one's) stride, at (a) pace

2024-11-11T22:45:00.005+00:00

This post is inspired by a poll that Ellen Jovin, aka the Grammar Table, ran in September. Before I get into that, let me point out that there is a Kickstarter to support the documentary about her spreading grammatical joy across all 50 US states. It'd be lovely to be able to see that film in a (BrE) cinema/(AmE) theater or event near you, near me and near everybody. So if you have the wherewithal to support it, click!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rebelwithaclause/rebel-with-a-clause

Now back to our (somewhat) regularly scheduled grammar-gazing.

to take (something) in (one's) stride

Ellen asked on social media whether people say take it in stride or take it in one's stride:

When I see a split like that, I think dialects.

The version with a possessive pronoun, to take in one's stride, is the more British (and non-North American) version:

And the shorter version, to take in stride, is the North American:

The phrase is a metaphor from horse racing. As the OED defines it:

to take in one's stride: of a horse or its rider, to clear (an obstacle) without checking one's gallop; figurative to deal with (a matter) incidentally, without interrupting one's course of action, argument, etc. Also (chiefly U.S.) without possessive adjective.

It seems to come from the UK in the early-mid 1800s, and then takes off in its possessiveless form in 1930s US. (The possessive-ful lines are low in the following graph because I had to choose just one possessive form to search—I chose his for the illustration because it's the most frequent in this phrase in Google Books.)

It's not clear to me whether AmE speakers back then were familiar with the racing expression. If not, then the expression might not have been recogni{s/z}ed as metaphorical, and therefore might be more likely to change.

But then again, I'm not sure the possessive is absolutely needed—you wouldn't take something in someone else's stride. So maybe Americans dropped the possessive in both literal and metaphorical usage. A horsey person might have to tell us.

at (a) pace

At pace (meaning 'moving fast') is a similar expression—a prepositional phrase involving a noun that alludes to walking—and it has no possessive or other word introducing it. But that doesn't help us explain the American loss of the possessive in in stride, since at pace is a more British and much more recent expression.

An older version has the indefinite determiner: at a pace. That's found in similar numbers in AmE and BrE. And then there's the very old (Middle English) expression apace, which means much the same thing and sounds much like at pace. It's possible that at pace is an eggcorn for apace, or that it's at a pace without the a, or maybe it's a bit of both—i.e. different people have come to the same form from different angles.

why?

So we have two phrases that originally had a determiner* (a possessive pronoun or an article) between a preposition and a noun for a stepping action, and in just one place (but not the same place) the expression has been getting shorter. Why? Well, the basic answer is: language changes and it doesn't ask anyone's permission. If it changes in one place it doesn't need to change in the other. And for set phrases like this, change is likely to be piecemeal. Just because one phrase loses its determiner, doesn't mean all such phrases will.

Since these expressions have got(ten) more and more figurative over the ages (referring to properties like ease and speed, rather than literal steps or paths), the determiners have had less and less work to do. Since they are unstressed syllables, they're easy to swallow up. So, if they go, we might not miss them, and if they stay they probably won't bother us. C'est la parole.

*You'll see above that OED calls these things possessive adjectives. I don't. They act more like determiners (e.g., a(n), the and this) than like adjectives like good or corporate.

one-off and one-of-a-kind

2024-10-20T22:32:00.003+01:00

Congratulations to Ben Yagoda on his new book Gobsmacked: The British Invasion of American English! If you like this blog, you are going to like that book. I was both gobsmacked and chuffed to see that I was among the dedicatees of the book (and in wonderful company). It even has an appendix of my UK-to-US Words of the Year! (And on that note—feel free to start nominating 2024's Transatlantic Words of the Year.)

Ben has been observing the transit of British English words, pronunciations and grammar for 13 years now at his blog Not One-Off Britishisms. So, to celebrate his book, let's look at one-off, the Britishism in his blog title. One-off can be used as a noun or an adjective to refer to something happens once and won't happen again.

Ben's blog evaluates previously British-only expressions that seem to be catching on in American English, and one-off was one he first covered in 2011. In the book, he gives more historical context for both the British and American usage. Google Books charts (nicely redrawn by Eric Hansen in the book) provide a handy view of the trajectory of British words in American publications over time.

In the case of one-off, the first known occurrence of it is in 1930s Britain. It seems to take off in Britain in the 1960s, then shows up in the US in the 1990s, picking up speed as it goes along. Here's the the relevant bit of the book:

He also categori{s/z}es each expression as to how entrenched it has become in AmE. In the case of one-off, it's "taking hold."

While Yagoda keeps track of the migration of Britishisms, my (self-appointed) job on this blog is to give American English translations. One-of-a-kind seems a good candidate But is one-of-a-kind American English or General English? And is one-off displacing it at all?

My first stop is the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, whose data comes from 2012:

Now, we don't always hyphenate one of a kind (it depends on how it's being used in a sentence), but this chart at least gives a sense that one-of-a-kind is used proportionally less in BrE, since it has one-off to use instead. In the same corpus, unhyphenated one of a kind is still "more North American," but more gently so: 490 US hits to 320 GB ones.

All of the Oxford English Dictionary quotations for one-of-a-kind are North American too—the first one from 1954 by American art critic Arthur C. Danto. (The first unhyphenated one is from 1977.) The OED does not, however, mark it as an American expression.

Now, one-off and one-of-a-kind aren't exactly the same thing. One-off has a more temporal connotation: it's happened once (and won't again). That said, you could say, for example, that a person is a one-off or one of a kind meaning that they're a unique kind of person.

So is the existence of one-off hurting one-of-a-kind? It happens to be easier to look at the unhyphenated version in Google Ngrams and the hyphenated one in the Corpus of Historical American English, so let's look at both.

First, we can see that one of a kind has been increasing fairly steadily in both AmE and BrE, but it's definitely more American. One-off's appearance on the American scene has not caused one of a kind to become less frequent.

And here's the hyphenated one-of-a-kind in comparison with one-off in American English since the 1940s. American use of one-off has taken off in the 21st century. One-of-a-kind is still used more, but the gap is closing:

How are both of these expressions doing so well? Well, it seems to be because everything in the world has got(ten) more unique. Here's the Google Ngram for unique, going up-up-up in English generally since World War II.

And just for the pedants, here's the chart for more unique:

(I wonder what proportion of the hits for more unique are just people complaining or warning against more unique.)

Anyhow, congratulations to Ben Yagoda on the success of his blog and the publication of his book!
And so many thanks for this kind dedication:

crochet, boondoggle, scoubidou

2024-09-15T17:28:00.004+01:00

Before the school year started, the 16-year-old and I (BrE) had a day out at a "Learn to Crochet" course. Here's my first. slightly (BrE) wonky (orig AmE) granny square (which, according to this site were once called American crochet in Europe):

The instructor started by warning to always ascertain the provenance of a crochet pattern before embarking on it because the US and UK terminology differ in potentially disastrous ways. In the take-home materials, we were given two charts. One spells out the differences in names of stitches. What's called single crochet in AmE is double crochet in BrE—with (orig. BrE) knock-on effects for other stitches. So, AmE double is BrE treble, AmE half-double is BrE half-treble, and AmE triple treble is BrE double treble.

Now the obvious question is: how can you get to double without having single first? The answer (according to KnitPro) is that the BrE is describing the number of loops on one's hook during the stitch, and the AmE is describing the number of "yarnovers when pulling up your first loop". Yarn over (the site uses it as one word and two) is another difference according to that site: in BrE it's called yarn over hook. Yarnover is essentially how many actions you're doing to complete the stitch. That KnitPro page has more description.

Let's just pause here and note that crochet is pronounced differently in the two countries because of the general rule that for two-syllable French borrowings, BrE stresses the first syllable and AmE the second one. And then there's what happens when AI gets its hand on the pronunciation:

But back to the charts the instructor gave us. Just as there are differences in measurements for cooking, the measurements for crochet hooks are different in US and UK because of the "Americans haven't gone metric" problem. The US uses letter or number sizes, whereas the rest of the world uses more transparent millimeter measures. So, US size B = US size 1 = 2.25mm. From the chart below, it looks like no one knows what size N or P are.

While knitting stitches generally have the same names in US and UK, knitters have the same problem for knitting needle sizes. You can find more info about these sizes and other conversion problems at the Craft Yarn Council website. (In my experience, new crochet hooks are likely to have both kinds of size printed on them, and online retailers will indicate both. But if you're using older hooks, you will probably need a chart like this.)

Now, this class wasn't really my first crocheting—I'd done straight lines and zigzag crocheting as a child. Also big in my Girl-Scouting (UK Girl-Guiding) childhood was (AmE) boondoggle. Nowadays, this is an American word that can mean 'a wasteful or useless product or activity', often in reference to (more AmE) government/(more BrE) public spending. Originally, it meant 'a trivial thing', from which came to be used for a kind of twisted leather object that Boy Scouts used for fixing their kerchiefs (click link for picture). It then extended to the weaving of flat plastic cords that was a popular craft back when I was a kid.

And I thought of that this week when the Google Doodle in the UK was in hono(u)r of this craft (which has apparently had a revival), except it had the BrE name for it, borrowed from French: scoubidou.

The Google Doodle was about "Celebrating Scoubidous". On first reading, scoubidous looked like an adjective to me (SCOUb'dous, that which is scoubi?). Part of the reason I read it wrong the first time (even though I knew the word scoubidou) is that I wasn't expecting it to be plurali{s/z}ed. I use boondoggle as a mass noun, so for me the things in the photos are pieces of boondoggle (or something like that), rather than as boondoggles. I'm not sure if that's just me, and there's too much 'government spending' noise in the data for me to quickly check it. (Happy to hear from other former Girl Scouts on the matter.)

Is scoubidou related to Scooby Doo? Not directly, I think. There was a song Scoubidou in the 1950s, and I suspect that the craft and the cartoon dog were separately named after it. But the dog's name was for some time spelled/spelt Scoubidou in France.

analogous

2024-08-26T21:34:00.002+01:00

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I notice things. One thing I’ve noticed is that no one seems to be able to agree with anyone else without saying 100%. That cliché seems to have caught on in both UK and US, so that’s not the topic of this blog post. This blog post is about another thing I’ve noticed: an apparent change in the British pronunciation of analogous.

Dictionaries give the pronunciation as /əˈnaləɡəs/ (or similar; all dictionary pronunciations here from the OED). That is to say, the stress is on the second syllable and the ‘g’ is pronounced ‘hard’ as in analog(ue). What I’ve been noticing in BrE speakers is a non-dictionary pronunciation, /əˈnaləʤəs/, which is to say with a ‘soft g’ as in analogy.

To see how common this pronunciation is, I looked to YouGlish, which finds a word in YouTube videos (using the automatic transcription), classifies them by country, and presents them so that you can listen to that word pronounced by lots of people in lots of contexts. The automati{s/z}ation means that it makes mistakes. I wanted to listen to the first ten pronunciations in US and UK, but had to listen to 12 in the ‘UK’ category to get ten that were both British and the right word.

screenshot from examplesof.net

The first British one had a pronunciation that I hadn’t heard before: /əˈnaləɡjuəs/, as if the spelling were analoguous. Half (five) of the British ten had the hard ‘g’ pronunciation, four had the soft-g pronunciation I’d been hearing, as if the spelling is analogious (or analogeous). All of the first 10 US ones said /əˈnaləɡəs/.

The word analogous seems to be more common in AmE. There are 2433 examples of it on US YouGlish, versus 147 examples tagged-as-UK. (The US population is about five times larger than UK’s, and Americans might post videos to YouTube at a higher rate than Britons. So while that’s a very big numerical difference, it doesn’t mean Americans say it16 times more than the British.) That’s in speech. In writing, there’s about twice as much American analogous in the News on the Web corpus:

So, Americans have presumably heard the word more than Britons have, leading to a more uniform pronunciation.

Now, when people know a word more from reading it than from hearing it, we might expect that they will rely on the spelling to know how it sounds. What’s a bit odd here is that the non-dictionary pronunciations contradict the spelling. Perhaps some people who know the word from print have not fully noticed that the spelling is -gous and think it’s -gious. Or perhaps they’re deriving the word anew from their knowledge of other members of that word-family.

Analog(ue) = /ˈanəl*ɡ/ + -ous = analogous /əˈnaləɡəs/ [dictionary]

(* different vowels: AmE [ɔ] or [ɑ] & BrE [ɒ])

Analogy = /əˈn*lədʒi/ + -ous = analogious > /əˈnaləʤəs/ [non-dictionary]

(* different vowels: AmE [æ] & BrE [a])

Analogu(e) + /ˈanəl*ɡ/ + ous = analoguous > /əˈnaləɡjuəs/ [non-dictionary]

In the last case, the ‘u’ that is silent in analogue is treated as if it’s ‘really there’ and pronounced in the extended form. This sometimes happens with ‘silent’ final consonants and suffixes. Think of how the ‘silent n’ in damn and autumn are pronounced in damnation and autumnal. This is a bit different, since it’s a vowel, and I can’t think of another example where a silent final ue does the same thing. We don’t go from critique to critiqual (it’s critical) and tonguelet is not pronounced tun-gu-let or tung-u-let: the u remains silent.

When I tweeted (or skeeted or something) about the soft-g analogous pronunciation, some respondents supposed that the -gous ending is not found in other words, and therefore unfamiliar. (One said they could only think of humongous, which seems like a jokey word). It is true that analogous is the most common -gous word, but the OED lists 153 others, most of them fairly technical terms like homologous, tautologous, homozygous, and polyphagous. There are fewer -gious words (83), but they’re much more common words: religious, prestigious, contagious, etc. The relative frequency of -gious endings versus -gous endings may have contagiously spread to analogous.

But there’s something to notice about contagious and its -gious kin and analogous and its -gous mates. The main stress in a word like contagious is in the syllable just before the -gious, i.e. the penultimate syllable (/kənˈteɪdʒəs/, religious = /rᵻˈlɪdʒəs/, prestigious = BrE /prɛˈstɪdʒəs/ and AmE /prɛˈstidʒəs/ ). (English stress patterns are often best described by counting syllables from the back of the word.) The main stress in analogous is not on the penultimate syllable, but on the one before (the antepenult). That is, we say aNAlogous not anaLOgous, no matter how we pronounce the ‘g’. If soft-g analogous was surmised from (mis)reading rather than hearing the word, and if it was following the model of words like contagious, we’d expect it to be pronounced anaLOdʒous, with some sort of O sound as a stressed vowel. That's not what's happening.

(One way to think of this is that there’s a general pattern that long -ous words are stressed on the antepenultimate syllable, but only if we think of the ‘i’ in -gious words as a syllable of its own, which gets elided after the stress pattern has been set. There’s way more to explain about that than I can do in a blog post…and I am relying on decades-old phonology education here.)

Now, I am not a phonologist or a morphologist, so I asked my former colleague and friend Max Wheeler to check my reasoning here. He's OK'd it and adds:

To make your argument another way, while -gous is unusual, '-jous' after an unstressed vowel is unparalleled.
[...] analogy is quite a common word, while analogous is much rarer (and people may not readily connect semantically to analog(ue)). Even people with a literary education are unfamiliar with the /g/ - /j/ alternation, so 'mispronounce' fungi, pedagogy, as well as analogous, taking no guidance from the spelling. The phoneme from the more frequent word-form wins.

The moral of the story: soft-g analogous is a bit weird—which is to say, a bit interesting.

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-og and -ogue

-ousness

conflab

graduation

2024-08-05T05:00:00.002+01:00

I'm in the US at the moment, where two of my nephews have recently finished (mostly now AmE in this sense) high school. That is to say, they (AmE) graduated from high school. Though their graduation ceremonies were in June, they are still in the midst of graduation party season—and we arrived in time to attend one of those parties. Invitations are extended to extended family, family friends, the graduate's classmates/friends and their nuclear families. And all family units who attend will bring a gift for the graduate. Back when I graduated, these were mostly presents you could unwrap. Dictionaries were common graduation gifts, and I recall getting a cookbook (orig. more AmE, vs BrE cookery book) and things for my (AmE) dorm room. I also got two handmade dolls, meant to represent me as a graduate—and since I'm at my childhood home, you get to see them. They're looking pretty good at 41 years old.

These days, graduation presents mostly come in envelopes. My first stop on this US trip was at the bank, to get some crisp (AmE) bills/(BrE) banknotes to slip into cards for the two nephews as well my niece, who has a freshly minted BSc in Economics. (If you've read The Prodigal Tongue, you've met her before. She was the niece who had things to say about British bacon.)

High school graduation parties are generally not held in England—partly because there one does not graduate from high school. Graduation is only for those who get a degree from a university. But even when people graduate with a degree, family parties like this are not common. Generally, Americans do a lot more of this kind of party-throwing and gift-giving to mark life transitions (and help out a bit). See the earlier post about showers.

Meanwhile, my 16-year-old (aka Grover) has recently finished secondary school in England. (Her secondary school, as it happens and unusually for England, has high school in its name.) Before school finished, she took 27 exams over 6 weeks in 9 subjects—this is what's known as the GCSEs (General Certificate[s] of Secondary Education). (NB: Many of the educational issues that come up here have been described in previous blog posts—rather than clicking on each link here, you might want to save your efforts for the 'related posts' links below.) Grover won't know her results in those exams till late August, when she'll be able to enrol(l) in the sixth-form college that's accepted her. (Though she's accepted to the college, she won't know until she has her exam results whether she's met the prerequisites for the A-level subjects she's chosen.)

Her status has been difficult to explain to her American family. Sixth-form college is not what Americans think of as college, which would be called university in BrE. In England, sixth-form (and many other diverse things!) counts as further education—after secondary school, but not degree-level study. In an effort to translate her status, she's started telling Americans that she's graduated. Her reasoning for this is that (a) they had a little ceremony in an assembly on their last day of school, (b) she's going to something called college, and (c) she's had a prom (an imitation of the American tradition for these younger students). But since she doesn't even know whether she's passed her exams,* it can't really be counted as "graduating", can it? I have suggested to her that she may be misrepresenting her situation. She doesn't mind. It might yet pay off...

What she is, in Britain, is a school leaver. Instead of getting a mortar board and gown, she got a (orig. BrE) hoodie. (Pic here from an Etsy shop. Grover's hoodie is back in Brighton.)

*Oh, I'm sure she's passed. Whether she's got the prerequisite grades is another matter, so it's all a bit stressful.

PS: While on this holiday, I have missed the University of Sussex graduation. I usually go, but since Grover's school ended early this year, we took advantage of being able to travel before the prices go insane during the (BrE) school holidays. (As Paul in the comments section notes, GCSE students just stop going to school after their last exam—it's very anticlimatic, but it got G out of school about a month earlier than usual. We hung around for the prom in early July.)

So, I want to say: Congratulations to our BA English Language and Linguistics and BA English Language and Literature graduates of 2024! Here's the outfit you didn't get to see me wear.

Related posts:

Types of schools and school years
(the one that's linked-to a LOT above!)

2021 UK-to-US Word of the Year: university

Academic titles and address

And lots of others with the Education label

conf(l)ab

2024-07-15T01:08:00.006+01:00

I've just found a bunch of research on my computer about conflab. I can't remember why I saved a bunch of corpus results on it, but maybe it was season/series 5 of Succession that brought it to my attention, when an Australian actress playing an Anglo-American rich person said it in dialog(ue) written by a rather British writing team:

I knew the word confab, a shortening of confabulation, and I'm pretty sure I'd heard conflab before and dismissed it as a speech error. This time, I did the responsible thing and looked it up. It's not a speech error.

Confabulation came into English in the 15th century from Latin, meaning 'a conversation'. (In the 20th century, it acquired a psychiatric meaning: 'a hallucination of a memory'. That newer meaning is irrelevant to the abbreviated forms I'm discussing here.) A confab is a conversation, an argument, or (in a later development) a conference or the like. It's an informal word, as clippings often are, and sounds a bit jokey—but it's surprisingly old. (Surprising to me, at least.) The first OED citation is a British one from 1701. The second is from Thomas Jefferson in 1763, so it was not unknown in America back then. Green's Dictionary of Slang has a few more British examples from the 18th century:

The OED marks conflab as 'chiefly U.S.', with its first citation being from Kansas in 1873:

Green marks it as American as well. His 1843 example is from a book published in Philadelphia. BUT before the 1873 Kansas citation, he has who British ones:

So is conflab an Americanism? Well, whatever its origin, it is more British now.

In the News on the Web Corpus, confab occurs 91 times in the BrE subcorpus (0.03 pmw) Conflab occurs 43 times (0.02 per million words)—so 1 out of 3 British conf(l)abs is conflab.

Confab is a much more common word in AmE than in BrE in the NOW corpus, occurring 1,494 times (0.20 pmw). Apparently, it's a popular word among American journalists. Conflab only occurs 4 times (0.00 pmw).

The Corpus of Global Web-Based English shows a similar situation, with confab far outnumbering conflab in AmE, but the L-ful form accounting for over 40% of BrE's conf(l)abs.

What's happened here?

Hypothesis 1: Conflab has always been more British than American.
Hypothesis 2: Conflab started in the US, and subsequently withered there, but not before it had been taken up in the UK.

Hypothesis 1 is semi-supported by Green's early examples, but not much else. The only historical BrE corpus I have quick access to is Hansard, the parliamentary record. That's not going to have a lot of informal language in it. For what it's worth, here's what it has for conf(l)ab(s): a total of 18 without L and 3 with L. The L-less ones get going in the 1900s and the L-ful ones are all after 1950. But I don't think we can make a lot of conclusions based on this particular data.

The Corpus of Historical American English has only one (1850s) example of conflab (and none of conflabs), but over 150 confab(s):

In other words, no matter where it started, conflab never really found its footing in AmE.

We've seen other cases before where something that started in the US was forgotten in AmE but retained in BrE. Of course, saying that, I now can't remember which ones we've said that for, except that it was true of quick-fire (link is to a Twitter/X post). If you remember others, remind me in the comments and I'll start a category tag for these!

PS: Jonathon Green, he of the dictionary (aka Mister Slang), sent me this reply via BlueSky. A big thank-you to him!

Separated by a Common Language

administration and government

alongside

Are these words misspelled/misspelt most?

US/UK variants

-or/-our

licence/license

Diarrhea/diarrhoea

jewellery/jewelry

Words that are just hard to spell

Weird

country

queue

Footnotes

Postscript (28 Feb): Another study!

nostalgia for present-day British English

US-to-UK Word of the Year 2025: zee

UK-to-US Word of the Year 2025: fiddly

fiddly

adjective

pleaded and pled

Pleading and plea-ing

The British history of pled

The American history of pled

Pled guilty in speech

Is pled in UK English a case of "Americani{s/z}ation"?

hadn't have VERBed

caught + ADJ

tips, dumps, fly-tipping, fly-posting, post no bills

fly-posting

the fine/small print

balk and baulk

tons, loads and heaps of

Anglo-Saxon

Anglo-Saxon v Old English

Anglo-Saxons = English speakers?

The Anglo-Saxon race-ism

WASP

Three uses of Anglo-Saxon in American and British corpora (Wilton 2020)

recipe verbs

Some actual cooking verbs

Some verbs that are often used to modify food words

Verbs of placing

Verbs of mixing and cutting

Verbs of baking/pastry

Verbs of preserving

Verbs of meat preparation

-ed versus -t

The origins of ‑ed

But ‑ed is only the spelling of the past-tense suffix

t/d variation

final d > t (no vowel change)

-pt versus -ped with vowel change

-Nt versus -ned with vowel change

In these ones, a final nasal consonant is followed by the -t suffix. The irregular forms also have a vowel change: the -Nt version has a "short E", while its -ed counterpart (leaned) has a "long E".

AmE uses regulari{s/z}ed leaned, while BrE still mostly uses leant, but both have mostly regulari{s/z}ed dreamed, and no one is saying meaned. Base formPast formAmE %BrE %dreamdreamt1633leanleant375meanmeant100100

I have to wonder if the loss of leant is related to its having homophones: lent, as a past tense of lend.

-rnt versus -rned

-rnt versus -rned

These have no vowel change. So, in spoken language, the difference is between saying burnt and burnd.

Base formPast formAmE %BrE %burnburnt2342earnearnt03learn learnt444

-led versus -lt

miscellaneous irregulars

The moral of the story is...

US-to-UK Word of the Year 2024: landslide

UK-to-US Word of the Year 2024: fortnight

beanie (hat)

in (one's) stride, at (a) pace

to take (something) in (one's) stride

at (a) pace

why?

one-off and one-of-a-kind

crochet, boondoggle, scoubidou

analogous

graduation

conf(l)ab

**Is pled in UK English a case of "Americani{s/z}ation"?**

AmE uses regulari{s/z}ed leaned, while BrE still mostly uses leant, but both have mostly regulari{s/z}ed dreamed, and no one is saying meaned.

Base form Past form AmE % BrE %
dream dreamt 16 33
lean leant 3 75
mean meant 100 100

Base form Past form AmE % BrE %
burn burnt 23 42
earn earnt 0 3
learn learnt 4 44