Separated by a Common Language

how big (of) a problem?

May 18, 2026

Tibs wrote to me in October 2020:

A few years ago, Americans started adding “of” in places it didn’t occur before. It gradually spread into books, and across the atlantic to here as well.

I don’t have an exact timing - less than 10 years?

I find it hard to remember examples, because it’s become part of the scenery, but it’s always a case where leaving out the “of” leaves the meaning identical

For instance: not that big [of] a deal ... as ordinary [of] a childhood as possible (this one from The Boys on Netflix)

My apologies, Tibs, for making you wait so long. Here we go!

What is it?

Linguist Harold Allen gave the change a tongue-in-cheek name: the Big of Syndrome. The adjective involved need not be big, of course. (Still, I'll use big of a lot here, because it's easier to find examples.)

Let's look at the elements of a big-of expression:

an adverbial element (e.g., as, how, quite, so, this/that, too) that's indicating 'measurement' of the adjective
a gradable adjective (i.e. the ones that can go with those 'measurement' expressions)
of [which is not there in the older form]
an indefinite noun phrase: usually one starting with a or an like an idea or a child; more unusually, you can find it with an indefinite (i.e. bare) plural or, even more rarely, a bare non-count noun [see examples 3 and 4 below, respectively].

That gives us the possibility of phrases like these (from the Corpus of Contemporary American English):

cacao provides habitat that is of as high of a quality as their natural forests (wisc.edu)
Seems like I took too long of a break.(ER [tv])
no matter how great their sacrifice or how big of heroes they might be (comment on a CNN blog)
I asked him about how big of threat is ISIS to America's national security (CBS Face the Nation)

Notice in example 3 we have both the traditional structure—how+ADJ+NOUN PHRASE (in blue)—and the new structure how+ADJ+of+NOUN PHRASE. Even if you have the big-of syndrome, you don't add of if the adjective precedes a definite noun phrase like the heroes or their sacrifice. And example 4—it's just a bit too weird, but we'll come back to that.

Why did people start saying it?

There are two reasons that big a deal might become big of a deal. One is that both of and a reduce to [ə] ('uh') in informal or fast speech (Rapp 1991). So, people hearing big ə deal might internali{s/z}e and learn it as big a deal or big of deal. I think that might be what's going on with example 4 —it might be that the transcript of the television program[me] has mistaken a threat for of threat.

But big of a deal has both of and a; we'd probably expect there to be two syllables even in fast speech. So I'm not convinced that the 'reduced pronunciation' explanation can explain the whole situation. I think we need the second reason.

The second reason is that this seems to be a case of analogical change. To quote Lyle Campbell:

In analogical change, one pattern or piece of the language changes to become more like another pattern or piece of the language, where speakers perceive the changing part as similar to the pattern or piece that it changes to be more like. (2020: 87)

The pattern that big-of sayers are imitating is the pattern that English already uses for much, as in:

How much of a problem is that going to be? Too much of a problem.

No one says *How much a problem or *Too much a problem.

Why try to make how big a problem more like how much of a problem? Well, first, you can probably see the semantic similarity there: both are asking about the extent of the problem. So, they may be perceived as belonging to the same pattern. (Interestingly, how much of a is fairly rare in the 19th century according to the Corpus of Historical American English. Too much of a is older. But I can't distract myself with that right now. I've already spent a whole day on this post.)

There's probably also some discomfort with the (standard) of-less version due to the fact that we don't usually have adjectives before noun phrases (big a problem). Adjectives usually go in noun phrases (a big problem). When noun phrases seem unconnected to other parts of an English sentence, of is often the glue that sticks the noun onto the sentence. Since of is the most semantically empty (meaningless) preposition, it makes no difference to the meaning if we add it in.

When did people start saying it? And which people?

Harold Allen named The Big of Syndrome in the mid–late 1980s (he had died in 1988 before his [AmE linguist-speak] squib was published in American Speech). Allen had noticed expressions like this big of a crowd and that nice of a day ("an innovating syntactic aberration") in the Minnesota speech around him, and urged linguists to study it further. Linda Rapp took up the call and published another short article in 1991.

Rapp found several examples from 1943 in Harold Wentworth's 1944 American Dialect Dictionary. Wentworth's examples seem to be from West Virginia and central Florida. Another early-ish example (1962) comes from The Andy Griffith Show, which takes place in a (fictional) small town in North Carolina. So those seem like hints that it might have come from the inland southeast.

But since, unlike Rapp, I'm working in the Age of Linguistic Corpora, I've been able to find it in some earlier examples. These are from the Movie Corpus.

1932

US/CA

The Death Kiss

If I'm any good of a guesser, he ought to be here by now.

1939

US/CA

The Little Princess

a cup of tea? - Oh no thank you. We're in too big of a hurry. Oh, I see.

1942

TV/MOV

Lure of the Surf

All right. Here. (Miles) I really think it's not that big of a deal.

I had a quick look for the screenwriters' birthplaces—The Death Kiss = Alabama and Hungary and The Little Princess = California and Wisconsin. No one will admit to writing Lure of the Surf (which was apparently mocked for promoting sea fishing while sensible people were worried about U-boats), but the 'self-narrator' was from the Bronx. So, only one of those writers fits with the inland-southeast origin story. All of this is pointing to it being widespread in spoken American English even earlier. If people were saying it in (orig. AmE) movies without comment in the 1930s, it must have felt at least somewhat natural by then.

Still, before the 1980s, the corpus examples are few and far between. Allen wrote about the "syndrome" just as this pattern was finding real purchase in published English as well as spoken, with how big of a deal leading the way:
Tibs thought he'd only heard the pattern in the past decade. That could be a case of Recency Illusion, or it could be that people in Britain just didn't hear it (or read it) much until the internet age. Sticking with big and deal (because the numbers are easiest to see), we can see it really taking off in the 2000s in published and performed American English. (Sorry, the text in these screenshots is not very clear, but know that the darker the blue, the more typical of a decade the phrase is. We can see big of a deal strongly associated with the 2000s, and much more so the 2010s. Neither of these corpora go into the 2020s.)

big of a deal in COCA

big of a deal in The Movie Corpus

Just to underscore the Americanness of the expression: at the right end of the Movie Corpus screenshot, it shows that 145 of the examples came from a North American film. Only 4 came from British or Irish films.

Is it British yet?

The of has been coming to Britain, as Tibs noted. The table below shows how often big of a deal/difference occur per million words in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (collected in 2012–13) and the News on the Web corpus (2010-now). In the news corpus, the BrE rate is 4 times lower than the AmE rate for each expression. The news data has a lot fewer of these expressions, presumably because the corpus has more professionally composed and edited text. The British news sources use the expressions at a quarter of the rate of the American news.

	US 2010s web	UK 2010s web	US 2010+ news	UK 2010+ news
big of a deal	.78	.14	.36	.09
big of a difference	.06	.03	.04	.01

And how is the old version doing?

Even though the of version is on the rise, the of-less version is still standard in print—in both countries.

References

Allen, Harold B. 1989. The Big of Syndrome. American Speech 64, 94–96. https://doi.org/10.2307/455116

Campbell, Lyle. 2020. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh University Press.

Rapp, Linda L. 1991. The Big of Syndrome: An Update. American Speech 66, 213–20. doi:10.2307/455893.

Labels: adjectives , grammar , prepositions | 1 comments

administration and government

Apr 12, 2026

It's about time this topic has its own blog post. It's been an aside to other discussions on several occasions. It's not so much a difference between American and British English per se, but a difference in how our political systems work, and hence a difference in which words we need to use about them.

PM's Question Time at UK parliament (Wikimedia commons)

Because the UK has a parliamentary system of government, the political party that controls the parliament is the ruling party of the government as a whole. So, people talk about the Labour government or the Conservative government when that party has the majority of seats in the House of Commons, since that party chooses the person who will be prime minister, who then makes the political appointments to cabinet positions. Those people of that party are, essentially, governing.

The US has a presidential system, in which the president is elected independently of the legislature. The executive (presidential) and legislative branches of government are accorded their own powers, and the party in control of the executive branch may not be in control of either or both of the legislative chambers (the Senate and the House of Representatives). So when talking about the president and cabinet, it's inaccurate to say things like the Obama government (let me live in the past, please), since the president leads only one branch of the government. Instead, we usually speak of the Obama administration.

So, this isn't really a difference between AmE and BrE because if Americans talk about British politics, they would need the more parliamentary language, and if Britons talk about American politics, they'll need the more presidential language, for accuracy. But do people always speak accurately about these things?

For government, they mostly do. The images below show the most common words between the and government in the AmE & BrE parts of the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, which was collected in 2012–13, when the UK had a coalition government of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. There, you can see coalition and Labour in the UK data, but only general adjectives and countries in the American. That hasn't changed in more recent data. There's little talk about the Biden government or the Trump government.

federal, US, Chinese, Israeli, British, American, central, Iranian, national, state, new, Japanese, Syrian, local

Most common words before government in GloWbE AmE subcorpus

UK, British, federal, US, Scottish, coalition, Labour, Chinese, local, current, new, Israeli, Welsh, previous, US

Most common words before government in GloWbE BrE subcorpus

At American sub-national levels, it works the same: American states have 'presidential' systems (just with governors, rather than presidents) and therefore they have administrations led by the governors, and American cities generally have city councils and mayors (details vary from state/city to state/city), and so we can talk of the administration of a mayor or a governor. You can see that in the GloWbE results below, where administration is mostly prefaced by names of presidents, but also, at the bottom Bloomberg, who was mayor of New York City at the time.

Obama, Bush, current, Clinton, Reagan, previous, new, Nixon, Carter, veterans, US, present, Kennedy Bloomberg

most common words between the and administration in US GloWbE

In the UK, Wales and Scotland have their own parliaments, and so we see them having governments in the chart above. At the county and city level, there are councils, and people often use the word council instead of government at the local level—e.g. the Labour council.

Directly elected mayors are a 21st-century thing in England, and we don't yet seem to be seeing much use of mayor's name + administration. I tried Johnson administration in GloWbE (since Boris J was London mayor in GloWbE time), but all examples in the UK referred to Lyndon Baines Johnson, the American president—and most of the other the ___ administration examples in UK GloWbE refer to American politics. (I also looked for the Khan administration in a more current corpus, but there one finds it referring to Pakistani politics, not the government of London.) But there is an interesting point at the bottom of this chart:

most common words between the and administration in UK GloWbE

The Labour administration is about 29 times less common than the Labour government, but it's there. A closer look at the data indicates that this use of administration is more common in Scotland—with most, if not all of the Labours from Scotland, and certainly all of the SNPs (Scottish National Party):

the + [UK party name] + administration

But that usage is going up, across the country:

the Labour/Conservative administration in the News on the Web corpus (UK part)

Without any willingness to go through a lot of examples, I can't tell you how many of these administrations refer to the UK government versus devolved country governments or local governments, but I believe there's a mix. There are a very small number of cases of the Sunak administration and the Starmer administration as well.

Administration is not the first more-American political word I've seen used in a slightly-out-of-sorts way in the UK: gerrymander was my US-to-UK Word of the Year in 2016. But lest you think political words only go in one direction, I'll point you to backbencher, my 2015 UK-to-US Word of the Year.

Labels: politics/history | 22 comments

alongside

Mar 21, 2026

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 felt surrounded by alongside.

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.

table shows Approx 50 alongside per million words in US corpus, 120 per million word

alongside by country

And within the US News data, the rise of alongside has sped up since 2020.

alongside on just American news sites

Among(st) the prepositions, alongside is a relative (orig. AmE) 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 or docks, etc. It seems to have gradually moved onto land, especially in the UK, in the 19th century.

So 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:

chart shows a decline in rate of use of amongst: from about 16 per million words in 2014 to about 8 per million words in 2026

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 the "British invasion" of 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 this blog gives us a record of me using it:

"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)

So, what do you think: do I sound Britified when I say such things, or is alongside completely international now?

***

PS: Searching for commentary about alongside, I found some concern about the use of alongside with. Further (orig. BrE) 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).

Labels: Britishization , prepositions | 5 comments

Are these words misspelled/misspelt most?

Feb 26, 2026

The people at WordUnscrambler.pro sent me a list of "the most misspelled (BrE misspelt*) words" for the UK. I get a lot of these "we did this thing so that your blog will give us free advertising," and I usually ignore them, but I'll give this one some attention—partly because they sent a US list to Language Log (who published it), so I can do some comparison.

But I first have to gripe a bit. Here's the methodology:

We analyzed Jan 1, 2025 - Dec 17, 2025 search data from Google Trends for "How do you spell" and "How to spell".

That's not a method for discovering the "most misspelled words." That's a method for discovering the most looked-up spellings. This is the kind of (BrE) jiggery-pokery makes me hate headlines. If you think to look up a word, then you might be insecure or curious about its spelling. But that's keeping you from misspelling it. I'm betting that when they're not looking up spellings like these, those people are out in the world (like the rest of us) are confidently spelling accommodation with one m and letting spellcheck catch it for them (or not).

Nevertheless, the WU.pro folks showed admirable linguistic sensitivity in not declaring the Americanisms on the list "misspelled." Instead, they note repeatedly that both the US and UK variants "are correct".

United Kingdom's most ~~misspelled words~~ queried spellings:
1.     Colour - 109 200 searches - Both colour and color are correct.
2.     Favourite - 82 900 searches - Both favourite and favorite are correct.
3.     License - 59 000 searches.
4.     Diarrhoea - 58 700 searches - Both diarrhoea and diarrhea are correct.
5.     Jewellery - 56 400 searches.
6.     Definitely - 53 000 searches.
7.     Auntie - 50 400 searches - Both auntie and aunty are correct.
8.     Weird - 48 000 searches.
9.     Business - 46 800 searches.
10.   Behaviour - 40 800 searches - Both behaviour and behavior are correct.
11.   Neighbour - 39 600 searches - Both neighbour and neighbor are correct.
12.   Country - 29 000 searches.
13.   Queue - 22 800 searches.
14.   Gorgeous - 22 600 searches.
15.   Necessary - 23 000 searches.

I've added the blue to show which ones are also on the US top 10, which I've copied at the bottom of this post.† (Not sure why the UK got a top 15 and the US a top 10. Nor why necessary has more searches but is lower on the list than queue.)

Some of these are definitely difficult—others, like country, surprised me. But let's have a little look at whether people do misspell them, using the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. (I'm using that one even though it's 13 years old now because web-based English is more likely to include misspellings than the published writing in other comparative corpora.) I won't try to cover all of them, just the ones that strike me as transatlantically interesting.

Postscript : On the same day as I wrote this post, another company released its (much better) analysis of British misspellings. See the bottom of this post for more on that.

US/UK variants

Where there are US/UK variants, it's often the case that the corpus has included American writing and tagged it as GB because it's on a British website (or vice versa). For that reason, I've (in another post) used -or/our spellings as a diagnostic for how reliable the country tagging is in GloWbE. So, it's not necessarily the case that BrE writers are mispelling them.

-or/-our

In that vein, the following graph shows that there's probably more AmE writing on UK websites than BrE writing on AmE websites—which is not so surprising, since there are presumably about 5 times more US than UK writers on the internet and text from American wire services and other companies might be reprinted wholesale on UK sites.

variant spellings for favourite, color, and neighbor show the O-R spellings strongly American, but they also account for about 1/5 of the British-tagged spellings

rates of -our versus -or spellings in GloWbE

But the other thing to take from the our/or chart is: Canadian spelling is in crisis. The (standard Canadian) -our spellings only just outnumber the -or ones. Meanwhile, the Canadian Prime Minister recently got into trouble for using British -ise spellings that are not traditionally Canadian.

licence/license

License is a tricky one because it's the correct spelling for BrE, when it is a verb. But it is licence in BrE when it is a noun (s in AmE for both). The first chart here shows a lot of (incorrect for BrE) license as a noun in the GB corpus—but that will, again, be partly due to American writing on British websites, rather than British writers misspelling it. It's hard to know how much each factor contributes.

in the word string 'a license to', there are 275 spellings with s on UK sites, and 450 with the "correct" c

So, more interesting from a misspelling standpoint is licenced, which is incorrect in all Englishes, but about 5% of the UK spellings. License is definitely a word that Britons misspell.

I was surprised not to see practice/practise on the UK misspelling list. You can read more about that at an older post, if you'd like to.

Diarrhea/diarrhoea

This one seems to have little to do with US/UK confusion. Diarrh(o)ea is just difficult and unpleasant for everyone. And personal: everybody's misspelling it their own ways:

(The crossed-out ones are names that happened to be caught on my search for "diarr*a". I don't envy them their diarr-a names.)

jewellery/jewelry

Jewellery is not marked with "jewelry is also correct" in WU.pro's list, but jewelry is the correct spelling in AmE. The AmE/BrE spelling difference is surely adding to the confusion about how to spell it, but the word is just difficult in its own right, with that double L and three-syllable pronunciation (=jewelry). Here's a shortened list of spellings in GloWbE (there are lots more one-off spellings), where the older, now-AmE spelling jewelry appears more than 1/3 of the time on the UK sites, but some definite misspellings make their way in too.

common misspellings include jewel + e r y , jewel + l ry, and jewel + l a r y

The later jewellery spelling seems to have derived from jeweller + y ('the stuff that the jeweller makes'—analogous to pottery) while jewelry derives from jewel+ry ('products created from jewels'—analogous to pastry, balladry). In 1901, the OED commented (about BrE usage):

In commercial use commonly spelt jewellery; the form jewelry is more rhetorical and poetic, and unassociated with the jeweller. But the pronunciation with three syllables is usual even with the former spelling.

So, we might consider jewelry to be AmE and old-fashioned BrE.

Words that are just hard to spell

Weird

It's been my perception that weird is more a problem in UK spelling, and GloWbE bears that out a little bit, with wierd a greater proportion of the UK forms (about 3%) than the US (about 2%):

country

Most people don't seem to have a problem with spelling country, but those who misspell it are not more likely to be British:

queue

The word is much more common in BrE, but hard to spell everywhere. And yet, people seem to mostly get it right. Leaving off the final e sometimes happens, but really not much:

I'd expected to find the word spelled like its homonyms cue and Q, but there aren't many such misspellings. For the following chart, I searched for queue, queu, que, Q and cue, but none of the queu spellings showed up in the 'in a' phrasing:

The Q spelling might be an abbreviation, rather than a misspelling. But it's striking that the cue homonym is absent from the British entirely. These people know a queue's a queue.

I'm going to leave it there! But feel free to comment on these or the other words on the lists.

Footnotes

* The fact that misspelled/misspelt has two spellings complicates the old joke: Which word is always misspelled? Misspelled! (Or is it misspelt?) Anyway, I have an old post on -ed versus -t past tenses.

† The American list, via Language Log:
America's most misspelled words:

Definitely – 33 500 searches.
Separate – 30 000 searches.
Necessary – 29 000 searches.
Believe – 28 500 searches.
Through – 28 000 searches.
Gorgeous – 27 000 searches.
Neighbor – 25 500 searches.
Business – 24 200 searches.
Favorite – 23 000 searches.
Restaurant – 22 500 searches.

------------------------------------------------------

Postscript (28 Feb): Another study!

Another company's marketing ploy, but a much better analysis of misspelling (though only for children):

Around 530 million spelling attempts from 936,926 pupils across the country were examined by education platform EdShed to draw their results, determining which words schoolchildren find most tricky. (The Independent)

Their list has only two overlaps with the WordUnscrambler one:

Sketch
Mischievous
February
Couldn't
Mustn't
License
Definitely
Indefinite
Convenience
Preferred

Labels: spelling | 22 comments

nostalgia for present-day British English

Feb 4, 2026

I get various Google Alerts for things related to my interests, and today I got one for a story in The Sun and the Daily Express about the '20 English words the public wants to revive'.

Now, if I want to read these articles, I have to pay or give them my first-born, or something like that, so I'm not rushing to read them. But I've got enough of a gist from the Google Alert (orig. AmE) blurb:

'Flabbergasted' among top 20 classic British phrases the public wants to revive | UK | News Daily Express Essential Words of the Year ... Classic British phrases like flabbergasted, chuffed, and gobsmacked are among the time-honoured words the public would ...

The "research", it seems, has been done in the hallowed halls of the Tesco Mobile marketing department, with the celebrity endorsement of Tom Daley and Gyles Brandreth. (There is a video on the various tabloid websites, again, if you want to allow them to put the devil's cookies in your computer.)

But it's enough to read that little blurb: flabbergasted, chuffed, and gobsmacked. The "British public" (Tesco Mobile customers?) wants to "revive" these "classic" words. You know, those moribund words that... wait a minute...

All three of these words seem to be in (BrE) rude health. Have a look at their use in British books. More and more in the 21st century:

Calling something that didn't exist before 1980 a "classic" that needs to be "revived" when in reality, it's just reaching its prime is blatant ageism, I say. Gobsmacked, I feel your pain.

But maybe books are weird. Maybe "real" people don't use these words. Maybe not, but the tabloid newspapers have certainly been reviving them for the past 30 years. Here's what you see if you search for these words in the archives of The Sun (courtesy of Nexis):

Each of those words is used more now than in the 1990s, and each has a peak around 2012. I'm not willing at this moment to dive deep enough into the Sun archives to fully analy{s/z}e that, but could the Olympics have something to do with that?

Are we the British public really missing these "classic" Britishisms? Or are we just missing feeling good about ourselves?

Labels: adjectives , more complicated than you might think | 11 comments

US-to-UK Word of the Year 2025: zee

Dec 31, 2025

And the 2025 Separated by a Common Language US-to-UK Word of the Year is (sorta kinda):

zee (but mostly Gen Z)

I must start by assuring you: British people generally do not call the letter zee. Nevertheless, I have reasons for choosing zee this year:

It is winning (particularly among[st] the people it describes) as the pronunciation of the generation name: Gen Z.
It is a word that comes up when people express worries that British children are "using American words", that perennial clickbait that baited a particularly large number of clicks this year. It started with The Sunday Times commissioning a survey of teachers; the results of that survey were consistently (determinedly) misinterpreted. The Sunday Times article doesn’t mention zee, but it came up often in the interviews I did after it. If you're interested, here's an episode of Lexis podcast where we talk about the survey (and its problems).
It was also the Americanisms that the YouGov polling organi{s/z}tion chose for the title of its report on Americanism use in Britain in April.

screenshot of YouGov website headline: Zed or Zee? How pervasive are Americanisms in Britons' use of English?

source

The results of that poll are informative:

I describe this graph in the text below.

source

Essentially: the majority of Britons under 50 report using zee in the name Gen Z, with more than 70% of those under 24 (that is, in Gen Z) saying it. The majority of Britons over 50 say they say Gen-Zed. All age groups, however, say that the alphabet letter 'Z' rhymes with bed at rates above 70%. The younger age groups (versus the older) have more people claiming to say the alphabet with an ex-why-zee at the end, but more people say zed for the letter than say zee for the generation.

That's self-reported data, and self-reports of linguistic behavio(u)rs require corroboration. We can find that corroboration. On YouGlish, you can hear both Gen-Zee and Gen-Zed in British speakers, but it's mostly Gen-Zee, particularly among younger speakers. One of the British speakers (Jessica Kellgren-Fozard) says Gen-Zee most of the time, but does say Gen-Zed at least once in one of her videos—and it wouldn't be surprising if many other speakers are inconsistent in this particular zee/zed. If you search for British people saying zee on Youglish, you'll get mentions of people named Zee and a fair amount of Mock French ("I am zee dev-ille"), but the letter-name is only used in contrast with zed. (Searching for Z in YouGlish gets you people saying zzzzzz, rather than saying the letter name, as far as I've seen.)

My daughter "Grover," has done a little poll of her 17–18-year-old friends, who all say they say Gen-Zee (she certainly does). She also notes that if she flaunts her half-Americanness and says a zee for the letter, her English friends give her a very hard time.

But check out Generation Z: most of the speakers on YouGlish say this with zed (even younger ones). It seems that the more "formal" and semantically transparent version of the word is treated more as if the Z is the letter of the alphabet. Gen Z seems to be treated as something more opaque—a name. (Grover claims Gen Zed is "hard to say." It does sound a bit more like it might be a past-tense verb.)

The term Generation Z seems to have originated in 1993, and is not marked as American in dictionaries. Gen Z followed in 1996, and is listed as "originally N. American" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Against the evidence we've seen here, the OED lists the zed pronunciation first for BrE:

But, in keeping with the YouGlish evidence, they do not include the zee pronunciation for the full form:

Gen Z, however you pronounce them, were born between 1997 and 2012 (or thereabouts)—so the oldest Gen Zers (or Zoomers, which happens to be the 2025 Russian WotY) were 28 in 2025, and the youngest ones entered their teens. So, they've become increasingly newsworthy and we're hearing Gen Z more. Here is how often Gen Z is used in the British part of the News on the Web corpus:

Those mentions will probably continue to go up as more of the group reaches adulthood. And some of them will be reaching voting age sooner than that.

(Happy Birthday, Grover!)

Zee and Zed
Sesame Street
Anti-Americanismism, Part 2
Zebra
Introducing Grover: Can you believe that she is 18?! She's gone from minor to major.

Labels: alphabet , epithets , WotY | 24 comments

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