tons, loads and heaps of

May 12, 2025

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!

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Anglo-Saxon

Apr 19, 2025

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:

Film Crave‬ ‪@filmcrave.bsky.social‬ · 8d Robert Eggers has revealed that the dialogue in his upcoming film #Werwulf will be entirely in Middle English: « It’s been said, and taken as official, that the movie is in Old English. But obviously, because of the 13th-century setting, it’s Middle English. I just want to be clear on that. »


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". 
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recipe verbs

Mar 17, 2025

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 lemon reamer; it has a handle to hold and a fluted end for putting into a lemon and twisting about
    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

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!

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-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.


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