Neil W. wrote to ask:
I am seeing lots of advertisements for a new film called "The Invite". (Sounds quite promising with Seth Rogen playing his usual character).
Here is a review from the notoriously picky Peter Bradshaw, who quite liked it. Within this article he uses the phrase "extend the invitation of the title".
So my question: is it an Americanism to use "invite" as a noun? I (Scottish) would certainly only use "the invitation". Or is some subtle difference (invite is by mouth, invitation more formal on paper) being implied?
Of course it might be one of those old UK usages that went to America and stayed.
Thanks for the question, Neil. And I'm even going to try to be topical and answer it while the film is still in (more BrE) cinemas/(AmE) theaters (in the UK, at least).
The Oxford English Dictionary has included the noun invite since its first publication (1900 for this bit of the alphabet), marking it as colloquial and tracing it back as far as 1659: "Bishop Cranmer..gives him an earnest invite to England." They have quite a few 19th-century examples and a couple from 1968 and 1970—all British, as far as I can tell.
[Postscript: As Graham in the comments notes: invite follows the same stress shift as many other two-syllable verb>noun pairs where the first syllable is a Latin prefix: verb inVITE, noun INvite; verb perMIT, noun PERmit; verb proGRESS, noun (more BrE) PROgress / (more AmE) PROGress etc.]
But invite (n.) seems to have really taken off even later than that. Here it is in Google Books since 1950 (searching any earlier gives us nothing remarkable). The blue line shows an increase in use, starting in the 1980s and shooting up in the present century:
And here are the numbers in 2012–13 in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. The darker blue on GB/IE indicates that it's slightly a more British/Irish thing to say.
Not everyone likes an invite. Merriam-Webster's website quotes a number of complaints, and notes that if you don't like invite as a noun, you don't have to say it—and you don't have to accept any invites that come your way. The Guardian Style Guide doesn't like the noun:
invitation noun
invite verb; so you do not send someone an “invite”
So Peter Bradshaw was following his guide in using a synonym for the film's title.
I perceive invite as used more for the physical invitation (e.g. a printed wedding invitation) than the speech act it communicates (i.e., the intention to invite). To test this, I tried searching for the invit* with (more AmE) a bunch of different verbs in GloWbE. Many of the verbs had too-tiny numbers to bother putting in this table (e.g. e-mail, distribute, order, select). (There weren't really enough to mention for deliver, but I had six rows in my table, so I stuck it in anyway.)
| verb | invitation/s GB | invite/s GB | invitation/s US | invite/s US |
| deliver* | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| mail*/post* | 2 | 2 | 3 | 0 |
| send*/sent | 4 | 6 | 3 | 4 |
| extend* | 11 | 4 | 17 | 1 |
| rescind* | 6 | 0 | 7 | 1 |
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ReplyDeleteI note that the noun (INvite) and the verb (inVITE) have different stress in my usage. Is that just obvious/normal for two-syllable nouns and verbs? Or is it something to do with my usage (I never use invite as a noun)?
ReplyDeleteReally good point. I've added a postscript in the post about it.
DeleteI remember a conversation back around 1980 with an American woman attending Cambridge University. She said that she was sending out invites for a party and I corrected her with invitations. It then occurred to me that we use both quote and quotation as nouns.
ReplyDeleteGreat point!
DeleteI’m sure I have heard people complain about “quote” in the same way (“I think you mean for quotation”)
DeleteStress difference for noun-verb (noun adjective occasionally) can also be three syllable words. ENvelope-enVELope e.g. Of course it is not universal because English language is ...
ReplyDeleteYes, but I'm only going to highlight one pattern at a time, because it's a blog post not a book!
DeleteI am probably a total snob, but for me "invite" (as a noun) is to "invitation" what "settee" is to "sofa" (or, indeed "toilet" is to "loo"). Another one that irritates me is "relative" (again noun, not adjective) vs "relation" - I know they are supposed to be interchangeable but for me they really aren't!
ReplyDeleteFor what it's worth, my English sensibility points in the same direction as yours (I was thinking about the distinction before you mentioned it): an "invite" is a bit of paper conveying the message, while an "invitation" is the message itself, howsoever communicated.
ReplyDelete