A few months ago, an American friend of my spouse asked him to ask me: "Why is everyone suddenly saying alongside?" I hadn't noticed it at that point, but once he'd mentioned it, I couldn't not notice it it.
As this Google Books ngram shows, the word has taken off in the 21st century:
Separating out the British and American books, we can see that this is a British-led trend.
Alongside climbed in British usage throughout the 20th century. American English suddenly decided to (orig. AmE) play catch-up in the 21st century.
This trend is observable in other corpora too. The News on the Web corpus, for example, shows more than double the rate of alongside in British news sources versus American ones.
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| alongside by country |
And within the US News data, the rise of alongside has sped up since 2020.
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| alongside on just American news sites |
Among(st) the prepositions, alongside is a relative newbie. In the OED, where it's marked as "originally nautical," its first citation is from 1704. Its definition: "In a position parallel to; side by side with; close to the side of; next to, beside." So the examples are about boats positioned next to other boats. It seems to have gradually moved onto land, especially in the UK, in the 19th century.
Why have Americans suddenly (orig. AmE) taken a shine to alongside? Why is it more attractive than along or beside or next to? Wondering whether there was a trend toward(s) longer, British prepositions, I tried comparing it to amongst. But the more-BrE amongst seems to have peaked in AmE about 12 years ago:
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| amongst on American news websites |
In 2013, the online magazine Slate published an article by Ben Yagoda about Americans saying amongst instead of among. Perhaps once people were talking about amongst, Americans became more self-conscious about it. If Ben published an article about alongside, could that change its fortunes?
Having had alongside pointed out to me, I'm now self-conscious about using it. But use it, I have:
- "BrE has kerb for the edging alongside a road" (curb/kerb, May 2020)
- "British pigs in blankets are small sausages wrapped in bacon (and cooked!). They are delicious. They're traditionally served alongside turkey as part of Christmas dinner." (pigs in blankets, Feb 2020)
- "I've seen a lot of "down with grammar!" messages, often alongside 'learning should be fun!'" (grammar is not the enemy, May 2016)
What do you think: do I sound Britified when I say such things, or is alongside completely international now?
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PS: Searching for commentary about alongside, I found some concern about the use of alongside with. Further rooting around in the corpora, though, show that alongside with is a tiny proportion of alongside usages (0.7 per million words in AmE, 0.8 per million words in BrE in the NOW corpus).
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