-ed versus -t

Feb 9, 2025

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 sent100 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 formPast formAmE %BrE %
creep crept 62 92
leapleapt5279
sleepslept100100
sweepswept100100
   weep    wept9998

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 formPast formAmE %BrE %
dreamdreamt1633
leanleant375
meanmeant100100

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 formPast formAmE %BrE %
burnburnt2342
earnearnt03
learn  learnt444

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 changePast formAmE %BrE %
dealdealt100100
feelfelt100100
kneelknelt8589

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 changePast formAmE %BrE %
buildbuilt100100
dwelldwelt8683
smellsmelt1348*
spellspelt749†
spillspilt1138^
spoilspoilt551

*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.
smelt!

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

Dec 31, 2024

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

Dec 30, 2024

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! 

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beanie (hat)

Dec 12, 2024

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.

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

Nov 11, 2024

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.
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one-off and one-of-a-kind

Oct 20, 2024
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:

Graph showing one-off usage in US lagging behind that in UK.

 
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:


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crochet, boondoggle, scoubidou

Sep 15, 2024

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):



a dark pink granny square on a wooden background


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. 


Crochet abbreviations conversion table: see paragraph above for the relevant difference

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:


Lynneguist on bluesky: The main thing I've learned from watching crochet reels is that the automatic voiceover pronounces 'crocheter' as 'crotch-eater'. If you close your eyes and listen to the narration, it takes on a rather different tone.



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.


This alt text is copied from the Craft Yarn Council site and may be a bit different from the picture of the chart from my crochet class: 2.25 mm B-1 2.75 mm C-2 3.125 mm D 3.25 mm D-3 3.50 mm E-4 3.75 mm F-5 4 mm G-6 4.25 mm G 4.50 mm 7 5 mm H-8 5.25 mm I 5.50 mm I-9 5.75 mm J 6 mm J-10 6.50 mm K-10 ½ 8 mm L-11 9 mm M/N-13 10 mm N/P-15 11.50 mm P-16 15 mm P/Q


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.

Screenshot of a google result for a Reddit page titled "You guys remember Boondoggle?! Anyone know any other cool stitches?" with three pictures of maybe 6-inch lengths of boondoggle/scoubidou in different colors

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. 

Version of the google logo presented in boondoggle/scoubidou braids.

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.
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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)