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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 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

frost/ice: See this old post.
(BrE) knock up (a crust): to seal and finish the crusts of a pie. (Here's an online discussion of it.) This is no doubt related to uses of the phrase in other crafts. Here's the first OED sense definition for knock up:

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!

Labels: food/cooking , verbs | 66 comments

stodgy and claggy

Jun 20, 2024

I have been asked many times if I've written about stodgy, and I always think I have, because I wrote a post about other BrE -odgy adjectives. I have no idea why stodgy didn't make it into that post, but I'm here to rectify the stodgelessness of this blog.

I remember (early in my time in England) asking an English friend what she meant when she said she looked forward to a bit of stodge. She meant 'a carbohydrate-heavy meal'. It was new to me, and this chart from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) lets you know why: most Americans don't talk about stodge:

stodge in the GloWbE corpus

But stodgy is a different matter:

stodgy in the GloWbE corpus

So how could I not figure out from context what stodge meant, if stodgy be a relatively common word in AmE?

Because Americans typically don't use stodgy to mean 'carb-heavy'. We mostly use it to refer to someone or something that is so conventional or inactive as to be dull. You can see this in the typical nouns following stodgy in the News on the Web corpus. Here are the top 3:

	BrE	AmE
1	stodgy food	stodgy industry
2	stodgy performance	stodgy incumbents
3	stodgy comfort food	stodgy reputation

Stodgy performance (in sport[s]) in the BrE column shows that it can also mean 'dull' in the UK. It's a negative thing when it comes to things other than food, and it can be negative regarding food too. You might feel unpleasantly heavy after eating stodgy food. But stodgy food can also be nice, as I know all too well.

Claggy reminds me a bit of stodgy, and it came up recently when I baked some banana bread for a gathering then overheard a participant describe it as claggy. This again, is a BrEism, which might have become somewhat familiar in the US due to the popularity of the Great British Bake Off (aka the Great British Baking Show: see this old post about that). It means 'having a tendency to clot'—so when it is used in reference to baked goods, it means something like 'so moist or undercooked as to feel gummy or clumpy'.

My thought on having my moist banana bread called claggy: Those who come empty-handed shouldn't throw baking insults, [IrE/AmE] bucko!

I reali{s/z}e I haven't given any AmE equivalents. That's because I felt like these words filled a gap in my vocabulary when I learned them. But if any Americans out there have some good words for these things, do let us know in the comments!

P.S. See the comments re the original 'muddy' sense of claggy. It's also made an appearance in the NYT Spelling Bee: an archive of disallowed BrE words post.

P.P.S. I dealt with this a bit more in my newsletter, including a less-used synonym of claggy, clatty. Related, there is also clarty ('smeared/covered with sticky mud'), which didn't make it into the newsletter, but is discussed in the comments below.

Labels: adjectives , food/cooking | 24 comments

colo(u)rful sauces

Mar 24, 2024

In 2009, my parents came over from the US and we took a trip to Italy: Florence, Pisa, and Rome. The food, of course, was gorgeous, but often clashed with what my mother thought of as "Italian" food—the type that one gets in the northeastern US, where Italian immigrants brought over a lot of southern Italian dishes, which were then adapted as tastes and ingredients changed. Because of this, she repeatedly asked "Is it in a red sauce?" Many of the waiters found this a strange question, but they could deal with strange questions from paying foreigners. My British spouse, however, found it too annoying: "What do you MEAN?" And Mom would say "You know, a red sauce. Like [AmE] spaghetti sauce". But he didn't necessarily know, because naming sauces by colo(u)r seems to be a peculiarly monocultural thing.

red sauce

Red sauce was only added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in 2005, so its definition is pretty up-to-date and shows the American sense:

(a) n. Any of various sauces that are red in colour, esp. (in the United States) a tomato-based sauce of southern Italian origin; (b) adj. (attributive) U.S. of or designating a type of Italian American cuisine characterized by the use of tomato-based sauces.

Wikipedia tells us:

Red sauce may refer to:

Marinara sauce, in the United States
Ketchup, in the United Kingdom and Ireland
Salsa roja, in Mexican cuisine
Red curry, in Thai cuisine

That list demands a translation and a synonym. Marinara sauce in AmE refers to a rather plain tomato sauce for pasta—the default pasta sauce in the US. It is so-called because it was reputedly the kind of simple sauce made or eaten by Neapolitan sailors. In the UK, one sees the word marinara on Italian menus referring to seafood sauces.

An Australian ketchup

An American passata

As far as red sauce referring to ketchup in the UK, I have heard it, but not often. Ketchup is the most common word for it in both countries, though Britons are six times more likely than Americans to call it by the full tomato ketchup (six times more likely in the 2012–13 GloWbE corpus, eight times more likely in the more recent NOW corpus). You sometimes hear in BrE the more AusE tomato sauce. In AmE, that doesn't mean 'ketchup', but is the equivalent (more or less: see comments) of the stuff that in BrE is usually called passata.

brown sauce

The British have brown sauce, of which HP Sauce is the original and most famous example. It's a condiment one buys in a bottle, made with vinegar, fruits, and some form of sugar. It is most often used with breakfast, and we've seen it before in my opus about bacon sandwiches.

Wikipedia's photo at brown sauce

In this vein, Americans have A.1. Sauce, which we never call brown sauce. Since the 1960s, it's been marketed as A.1. Steak Sauce—which points to another American sauce term. Steak sauce, Wikipedia tells us, is:

a tangy sauce commonly served as a condiment for beef in the United States. Two of its major producers are British companies

That last bit was news to me. I import A.1. from the States because I love it so. (I find it spicier and less treacly than HP sauce. It's also much darker.) In the UK, I've only ever seen it in Fortnum and Mason (extremely chichi shop), where they charged in the double digits for a bottle, apparently imported from the US. But A.1. (in some formulation) may still be being made in the UK for export to Asia! (The most recent reference to this I've found is 2018.)

Back to brown sauce. The OED definition has not been updated since 1888, and it has only the French-cuisine inspired meaning, akin to gravy: "A brown-coloured savoury sauce, esp. one made with browned fat and flour." When I was a(n American) child in the 1970s–80s learning about cooking, I learned this among other sauce terms—though I can't say I've ever heard it in my adult life.

But brown sauce was another bit of my mother's terminology that didn't help when travel(l)ing: she'd talk about her Chinese food preferences in terms of preferring brown sauce over white sauce, and British Spouse didn't understand what she meant. But, she knew what she was talking about. Goodcooking.com has a story about a sauce master at a Chinese restaurant which includes (with recipes):

Two basic sauces are the brown sauce and white sauce. Brown sauce is mainly for meat dishes; beef, lamb, duck, yet he also used it in his Chendu Fish dish, to bind together moo shu and one of his tofu dishes. The white sauce was for fish and seafood, chicken and vegetable dishes. Other ingredients such as black beans, chili with garlic, preserved vegetable, ginger and garlic were added as items cooked and then his sauces were added, seconds before service to bind everything into a flavorful dish.

From the spelling of flavorful, we can guess that this Chinese restaurant was in the US, and from a little knowledge of Chinese food in the anglosphere, I would guess that (a) this might be based in some specific regional Chinese cuisine, and (b) the term is not much used in British Chinese cuisine. Having had a lot of Chinese takeaways/takeout in the US, UK and South Africa, I can report that even if you're ordering a dish of the same name (chicken in garlic sauce, sweet-and-sour pork, General Tso's chicken etc.), they are very different in different places. (Let's just say: my English family always makes a point of having Chinese food when we're in the US.) Yummly.co.uk has many recipes for Chinese brown sauce, but, despite the 'uk' in its URL, all the brown-sauce recipes I checked there have American terminology (cornstarch, scallions, chicken broth/bouillon etc.). If there were any urge to call Chinese sauce base brown in British English, it would probaby be blocked by the clash with the breakfasty condiment.

white sauce

White sauce has at least the following meanings:

In (US, at least) Chinese cuisine, it's the opposite of brown sauce. (This site says it's typical of Cantonese cooking.)
A sauce base made of "roux of butter and flour combined with milk or cream" (OED).

The OED's (2015 updated) entry includes only the last of these, which is often used in French cooking. It's also what my mother used as the opposite of red sauce in Italian cooking, so an Alfredo or similar.

Speaking of white sauces in Italian cooking—I grew up hating (AmE) lasagna/(BrE) lasagne because I couldn't stand the ricotta cheese. Well, it turns out, British people don't make lasagne with ricotta (nor do many in Italy). Instead it has a béchamel sauce. Meanwhile, I've outgrown my hatred of ricotta. Still, lasagn{a/e} is the last thing I'd order on any pasta menu.

Finally,

for the fun of it, a Venn diagram of sauces by Zoe Laughlin, recently discussed on BBC Radio 4 and pointed out to me by one of my writing group pals:

Labels: colo(u)rs , food/cooking | 44 comments

NYT Spelling Bee: an archive of disallowed BrE words

Apr 11, 2023

Twitter has been my main internet stomping ground since 2009, but I've been withdrawing my labo(u)r from it since October, when it became much more volatile for some reason.

The New York Times Spelling Bee has been my morning-coffee activity for some of those years, and since November 2020 I've been jokingly tweeting the British English words that it hasn't accepted. These go in a thread of posts that always start:

Perfectly Common BrE Words the @NYTimesGames Spelling Bee Has Denied Me: An Occasional Series

Twitter has really degraded this week, which is making me feel a bit sad that perhaps that thread will have to die. (I'm also sad that the thread has frayed along the way—it's very difficult to read it all the way to the beginning because it splits here and there.) So as a clearly procrastinatory measure, I'm putting the list of "perfectly common BrE words" here, with a little more explanation than they tended to get on Twitter.

For those who don't know the Bee: it's an anagram game where one must use the middle letter. The twist—and what makes it a superior anagram game—is that you can use any of the letters as many times as you like. Here's what it looked like on the 5th of April when I hadn't yet got to Genius level. (My goal every day is 'make it to Genius before breakfast'. It's nice to be called 'Genius' before you've started work.)

The game, of course, has its own word list, which is suitably American for its New York Times home. Still, some not-usually-AmE words are playable, like FLATMATE, LORRY and PRAM. But many words that are part of my everyday vocabulary in England are not playable. And non-AmE spellings are generally not playable.

There's been a lot of attention to AmE words that (orig. AmE) stump non-American players in Wordle. (Here's Cambridge Dictionary's 2022 Word of the Year post, which covers some—and includes a video in which I talk about why HOMER was a great choice for Word of the Year.) Not as much attention has been paid to the Spelling Bee, which you need to subscribe to. I'm sure British players have their own (mental) lists of American words they've had to learn in order to get "Queen Bee" status (finding all the day's words) in the game. If you're one of them, do use the comments to tell us about those weird words.

So, after all that preamble, here are the "Perfectly Common BrE Words the @NYTimesGames Spelling Bee Has Denied Me" words in alphabetical order, with translations or links to other blog posts. But first, a bit more preamble. The disclaimers!

Words in the puzzle must be at least four letters long, so some of these are suffixed forms for which the three-letter base word was unplayable. If there's an -ED form but not an -ING form (etc.), that'll be because the other one's letters weren't in the puzzle.
Some of these would not have been allowable—regardless of their dialectal provenance—on the basis that they are "naughty" words. I include them anyway.
I have checked questionable cases against the GloWbE corpus to ensure that the word really is more common in BrE than AmE.
Some are Irish or Australian by origin, but they are still more common in BrE than in AmE.
Sometimes my spelling is a bit liberal here. If I could find one British dictionary that allowed me the word with the given spelling, I included it.
Also the phrase "perfectly common" is not meant to be taken too seriously!
These words were not playable at the time when I tried to play them. The word list may have changed and some of them may be playable now.
Red ones are ones that have been unsuccessfully played/tweeted about since I first started this blog list.

*On 12 March 2025, Spelling Bee celebrated its 2,500th puzzle by adding an S to the mix. So, any here with an S come from that day.

ABATTOIR AmE slaughterhouse

AGGRO aggression, aggressive behavio[u]r

AITCH the letter. Less need to spell it as a word in AmE. See this old post.

ALUMINIUM = aluminum (for the whole story, see The Prodigal Tongue!)

ANAEMIA / ANAEMIC AmE anemia/anemic

ANNEXE minority spelling in BrE; usually, as in AmE, it's annex

APNOEA AmE apnea

APPAL AmE appall; old post on double Ls

ARDOUR old post on -or/-our

ARGYBARGY this is a bit of a joke entry because it's usually spelled/spelt ARGY-BARGY (a loud argument), but the Squeeze album has no hyphen.

ARMOUR -or/-our

BALLACHE something annoying or tedious (usually hyphenated, but some dictionaries include the closed-up version)

BEANO slang, a party

BIBBED I don't know why this shows up more in BrE data, but it does, just meaning 'wearing a bib'

BINMAN / BINMEN AmE garbage man (among other terms); old post on bin

BINT derogatory term for a woman

BITTY having lots of unconnected parts, often leaving one feeling unsatisfied; for example, this blog post is a bit bitty [has now been added!]

BLAG covered in this old post

BLUB / BLUBBING to sob (= general English blubbering)

BOAK retch, vomit, throw up a bit in the mouth. That was gross. Sorry.

BOBBLY having bobbles

BOBBY Informal term for police officer. In AmE, found in bobby pins.

BODGE / BODGED make or fix something badly

BOFFIN see this old post

BOLLOCK / BOLLOCKED reprimand severely

BOLLOX This one's more common in Irish English than BrE. To screw something up. (Note that bollix—same thing—is playable.)

BOKE see BOAK

BONCE the head (informal)

BOYO a boy/man (Welsh informal)

BRILL short for brilliant, meaning 'excellent'; also a kind of European flatfish

BROLLY umbrella (informal)

BUNG / BUNGING see this post on recipe verbs

BUTTY see this old post

CAFF a café, but typically used of the kind that is analogous to an AmE diner (that is to say a café is not as fancy in BrE as it would be in AmE)

CANDIDA the yeast that causes thrush. The name of the yeast is often used as the name of the infection in BrE. AmE uses the phrase yeast infection more than BrE does. Related post on what infections are called.

CAWL a soupy Welsh dish (recipe); also a kind of basket

CEILIDH a Scottish social dance (event)

CHANNELLED post on double Ls

CHAPPIE a chap (man)

CHAV / CHAVVY see this old post and/or this one

CHICANE a road arrangement meant to slow drivers down; see this old post

CHILLI see this old post

CHIMENEA / CHIMINEA the 'e' spelling is considered etymologically "correct" but the 'i' spelling seems to be more common in UK; I think these kinds of outdoor fireplaces are just more trendy in UK than in US?

CHIPPIE alternative spelling of chippy, informal for a (fish and) chip shop

"cholla" at a UK online supermarket

CHITTY a chit, an IOU (informal)

CHOC chocolate (informal, countable)

CHOLLA a spelling of challah (the bread)

CLAG mud; more common is claggy for 'having a mud-like consistency'

COLOUR -or/-our

COMPO in military slang, packaged rations; in general English, composite building material; in Aus/NZ worker's compensation

CONNEXION this is a very outdated spelling of connection. Not actually used in UK these days, but wouldn't it be nice to be able to play it?

COOTCH a hiding place, a shed or similar (from Welsh cwtch)

COPPICE a (formerly) wooded area, where the trees have been cut back to encourage growth; or the act of cutting them back

COUNCILLOR post on double Ls

CRAIC it's really an Irish one (a 'good time'), but it qualifies here because it's used more in BrE than AmE (and understood pretty universally in UK)

CRIM criminal

CUTTY short (in some UK dialects)

DADO as in dado rail, what's often called a chair rail in AmE (here's a picture)

DEFENCE AmE defense

DEMOB /DEMOBBED de-mobilize(d); that is, released from the (BrE) armed forces / (AmE) military

DENE a valley (esp. a narrow, wooded one) or a low sand dune near the sea (regional)

DEVILLED post on double Ls

DIALLING post on double Ls

DIDDY small (dialectal); see this old post

DOBBED / DOBBING actually Australian, dob = to inform on someone; see this old post on the BrE equivalent grass (someone) up

DODDLE it's a doddle = (orig. AmE) it's a piece of cake (very easy)

DODGILY adverb form of dodgy, which is in the Bee

DOOLALLY out of one's mind

EQUALLED post on double Ls

FAFF / FAFFING / FAFFS one of the most useful BrE words. See this old post.

FARL a kind of (AmE) quick bread, usually cut into triangles; can be made of various things, but here's a recipe for a common kind, the potato farl

FAVOUR -or/-our

FILMIC cinematic, relating to film

FILO = phyllo (pastry)

FITMENT = AmE fixture, i.e. a furnishing that is fit(ted) in place

FLANNELETTE = AmE flannel old post on flannels

FLANNELLING form of the verb meaning 'to flatter'

FLAVOUR -or/-our

FLAVOURFUL -or/-our

FLORIN a British coin from the pre-decimalization era

FOETAL AmE (and BrE medical) fetal

FOOTMAN a servant or (formerly soldier (of a particular rank)

FUELLED post on double Ls

FULFIL post on double Ls

FUSSBALL [pronounced Germanly] = foosball (table football)

GADGIE / GADGE guy, man, boy (regional)

GAMMON this post covers the 'meat' meaning, but lately it's also used as an insult for Brexiteers and their political similars

GAMMY (of a body part) not working well; e.g. I have a gammy knee

GANNET a type of sea bird, but also BrE slang for a greedy person

GAOL now less common spelling for jail

GHYLL alternative spelling of gill, a northern dialectal term for a ravine [not really all that common—all the dictionaries prefer the simpler spelling]

GIBBET gallows; to hang (a person) [not really in current use]

GIFFGAFF now better known as the name of a mobile phone company, it's an old slang word meaning 'mutual assistance' or 'banter'. (Oxford hyphenates it, but Merriam-Webster doesn't)

GIGGED / GIGGING to perform at a gig [playable as of May 2023]

GILET covered at this clothing post and also at this pronunciation post

GIPPING form of gip, a synonym of BOAK (see above)

GITE French, but used in English for a type of holiday/vacation cottage

GOBBED / GOBBING form of gob, which as a noun means 'mouth', but as a verb means 'spit'

GOBBIN waste material from a mine

GOBBY mouthy

GOOLY (more often GOOLIE, GOOLEY) a testicle (informal, see GDoS)

getting gunged/slimed

GUNGE any unpleasant soft or slimy substance; also used as a verb for having such stuff poured over one's head on a children's show (= AmE slime)

GURN / GURNING see this old post

HAITCH = AITCH, but pronounced differently See this old post.

HALLO old-fashioned hello

HENCH strong, fit (like a weightlifter)

HOLDALL a duffel bag or similar heavy-duty bag; often spelled with a hyphen (hold-all), but at least some places don't.

HOOPOE a kind of bird (mostly African), which sometimes makes it to England

HOGMANAY it is a proper noun, but I wanted to include it anyway

HOICK / HOIK to lift/pull abruptly

HOTCHPOTCH AmE hodgepodge

INNIT invariant tag question: isn't it?

INVIGILATING AmE proctoring; old post

JAMMY lucky; old post

KIRK church (Scotland)

KIPPING form of kip, to take a nap

LAIRY (esp. of a person) unpleasantly loud, garish

LAMBING form of to lamb, give birth to lambs. Often heard in lambing time or lambing season

LAMPED form of to lamp, to hit a person very hard

LARKING form of to lark, 'to behave in a silly way for fun'

LAVVY lavatory (informal)

LAYBY AmE turnout (and other synonyms/regional terms); a place where a car can move out of the flow of traffic (usually has a hyphen lay-by, but I found one dictionary that doesn't require it)

LICENCE is the noun form of the verb license in BrE; in AmE, both are license

LIDO an outdoor public swimming pool; there's some debate about how to pronounce it

LILO a blow-up mattress for floating on in a pool

LINO short for linoleum

LOLLY lollipop or (AmE) popsicle (especially in ice lolly)

LOVAGE a(n) herb that Americans don't see very often [has been added! Played successfully on 3 May 2023]

LUPIN AmE lupine, a flower

LURGI / LURGY see this old post

MEDIAEVAL the less common spelling of medieval

MILLIARD (no longer really used) a thousand million, i.e. a billion

MILORD address term for a nobleman

MINGE a woman's pubic hair/area (not flattering)

MINGING foul, bad smelling, ugly (rhymes with singing!)

MOANY apt to moan

MODELLED post on double Ls

MOGGY a cat (informal)

MOOB man boob

MOTTE part of a motte-and-bailey castle

MOULT AmE molt (related to -or/-our)

MOZZIE mosquito

MUPPET in its lower-case BrE sense: 'idiot; incompetent person'

NAFF this has come up in posts about 'untranslatables' and about a study that identified common BrE words Americans don't know

NAPPY AmE diaper

NAVVY a manual labo(u)rer (old-fashioned)

NEEP Scottish English for what the English call a swede and what Americans call a rutabaga (old post on the latter two)

NELLY in the BrE phrase not on your nelly (= AmE not on your life)

NIFFY unpleasant-smelling

NOBBLE to unfairly influence an outcome; steal

NOBBLY alternative spelling of knobbly (which is more common in both AmE & BrE)

NONCY adjective related to nonce (sex offender, p[a]edophile)

NOWT nothing (dialectal)

ODOUR -or/-our

OFFENCE AmE offense

OFFIE short for BrE off-licence; AmE liquor store (discussed a little in this old post)

OPPO informal (old-fashioned) a colleague or friend

ORACY the speaking version of literacy; in US education, it's called orality

PACY having a good or exciting pace (e.g. a pacy whodunnit)

PAEDO short for pa(e)dophile

PANTO see this post

PAPPED / PAPPING from pap, to take paparazzi pictures

PARLOUR -or/-our

PARP a honking noise

PEDALLED post on double Ls

PELMET another one from the study that identified common BrE words Americans don't know

PENG slang for 'excellent'

PHOTOCALL an occasion when celebrities pose for photos

PICCALILLI a mustard-based relish

PIEMAN / PIEMEN this one is usually two words (pie man), but I was able to find a dictionary that allowed it as a single word, so I added it to the list

PIPPED / PIPPING pip = to defeat by a small amount; often heard in to be pipped at the post

PITTA another spelling for pita, more in line with the BrE pronunciation of the word

PLAICE another one from the study that identified common BrE words Americans don't know

PLUMMY see this post

PODGY chubby

POMMY another Australian one, but English people know it because it's an insult directed at them, often in the phrase pommy bastard

PONCE / PONCY see this post

PONGING horrible-smelling

POOED / POOING see this post for the poo versus poop story

POOTLE to travel along at a leisurely speed

POPPADOM / POPPADUM anything to do with Indian food is going to be found more in UK than US

PORRIDGY like porridge, which in AmE is oatmeal

PUFFA full form: puffa jacket; a kind of quilted jacket; it is a trademark, but used broadly; I did find it in one dictionary with a lower-case p

PUNNET see this old post

QUIETEN, QUIETENING AmE uses quiet as a verb

RAILCARD you buy one and it gives you discounts on train tickets

RANCOUR -or/-our

rollmop pic from Wikimedia

ROTA a list of who's doing what when—e.g. a cleaning rota

ROLLMOP pickled herring fil(l)et wrapped around a filling

RUMOUR -or/-our

TANNOY AmE loudspeaker, public address system (originally a trademark, but now used generically)

TARTY dressed (etc.) in a provocative manner

TELLY (orig.) AmE tv

TENCH a Eurasian fish

THALI another Indian menu word

THICKO stupid person

TIDDY small (dialectal)

TIFFIN usually referring to chocolate tiffin (recipe)

TINNING AmE canning

TITBIT see this post

TITCH a small person

TIZZ = tizzy (to be in a tizz[y])

TOFF an upper-class person (not a compliment)

TOMBOLA see this post

TONTINE a kind of investment scheme that pays an annuity

TOTTED / TOTTING see this post

TOTTY an objectifying term for (usually) a woman

TRUG a kind of basket; these days, often a handled rubber container

TUPPENCE two pence

TWIGGED, TWIGGING form of twig 'to catch on, understand'

UNEQUALLED post on double Ls

VALOUR -or/-our

VIVA an oral exam (short for viva voce)

WAIN archaic a cart (kept alive by the fame of Constable's painting The Hay Wain)

WANK / WANKING my original Word of the Year (2006!)

WEEING AmE peeing

WELLIE / WELLY a (BrE) wellington boot / (AmE) rubber boot

WHIN a plant (=furze, gorse)

WHINGE AmE whine (complain) [now playable]

WIGEON a kind of duck (there are American and European wigeons, but for some reason the British talk about them more than Americans do, so it shows up in the British corpus more)

WILLIE / WILLY penis

WOAD a plant used to make blue dye

WOLD a clear, upland area (mostly in place names now)

WONGA slang: money

WOOLLEN post on double Ls

YOBBO / YOBBY hooligan / hooliganish

YODELLED post on double Ls

YOICK to cry out yoicks! in fox-hunting (not exactly common, but it's in a dictionary)

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Separated by a Common Language

Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK