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 tippingand dumping:
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 termfly ballcomes 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-postingmeans: 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.
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.
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:
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, showingthe fine printand 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 printonly 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 printis 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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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 itand 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 variationcan 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 balkedin 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.
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/sealantinstead)—but that came into English with the u, as it came from French cauquerin 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!)
I belong to a fantastic international writing group. There, last week, I presented a paragraph that included "tons ofsomething" (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 ofhad less than 1 per million in all of the country corpora. Itseems to be more often literal in all countries—lots of bunches of grapes, flowers, or asparagus, and a few bunchesof people, websites, and, in one NZ example: "small bunchesof 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:
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):
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.
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".
When I first moved to the UK, I hungrily watched the (orig. AmE) tv in my sublet apartment/flatin 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 bungand tipare 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 bonesand to "gently gush [some AmEbroth/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 OEDor 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:
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
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 aboutavocado toastwithout 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:
BrEbung: 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 tipinmeans, 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.
(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) booksnow, 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 pullin 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.
(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 / proveIn 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 canningeven 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 bottleas 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.
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