Separated by a Common Language

the fine/small print

Jul 13, 2025

Last month, Dave Mandl tagged me on this message on Bluesky:

I hadn't really reali{s/z}ed it either, till Dave pointed it out. But sure enough, it is the case. Here are a couple of screenshots from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, showing the fine print and the small print with a bit more grammatical context:

GloWbE results showing fine:small in the phrase IN THE _____ PRINT at a ratio of 87:9 in US and 15:93 in UK.

GloWbE results showing fine:small in the phrase READ THE _____ PRINT at a ratio of 157:22 in US and 47:126 in UK.

Before we get into the how, when, and where of this, let's start with the what. There are three uses of the fine/small print to sort out, which arose in this order:

the original, literal meaning: printed characters that small in dimension and (relatedly/therefore) light in line thickness, and therefore difficult to read

e.g. I can't read such small/fine print without my glasses.
the extended meaning the fine/small print: supplementary text to a contract or other document that expresses terms and conditions, typically printed in a small/light font

e.g. They hid the extra penalty fees in the small/fine print.
more figurative uses (again with the): important, technical/non-obvious information that one might not have paid attention to, but that might have serious repercussions.

e.g. "The fine print of what Obama is doing is far less dramatic than many of his defenders and critics claim." (Cedar Rapids, IA Gazette, quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary)

In the literal sense 1, the OED has examples of small print all the way back to the 1500s; fine print only appears in 1761. All the first citations are from England, but all their examples of fine print from the 1850s onward are American.

In the extended sense 2 (from what evidence we have), the fine print shows up first—in an American case-law reporter in 1891. The small print is first found in a yachting manual published in London in 1900.

It's hard to say when these expressions got more figurative. The OED only gives a separate figurative sense 3 for fine print (first example, 1948) with just "also figurative" at sense 2 for small print. It's a bit annoying that the two are treated differently, but it appears to be because the figurative examples of fine print in AmE are just more figurative. In the 'figurative' fine print examples, like the Obama one above, we're looking at deeds rather than words. But the not-really-about-print examples of sense 2 for small print involve language (if not print), as in this example from the Telegraph:

1971
Some interest attaches therefore to the ‘small print’ of the Queen's speech and how far it avoids firm undertakings on some of the more controversial measures.

So, to sum up, it looks like, for some reason, AmE liked the phrase fine print more than small print for the literal stuff, and then it added an extended meaning relating to contractual language. You can see the frequency of the phrase rising as it gets more uses—and the neglect of small print in the Corpus of Historical American English:

Then after the meaning was extended, it looks like it was calqued into BrE—which is to say BrE took the idea and put it into the more familiar phrasing small print.

I wondered whether there were broader differences in the use of fine in its 'slim, delicate' linear senses in AmE and BrE. I found a few things, but they don't add up to much of a picture:

fine line: consistently more AmE than BrE hits in singular
fine lines and wrinkles: This phrase had 3x more hits in BrE than AmE in GloWbE (2012–13), but only about 1/3 more in the more recent News on the Web (NoW) corpus. It's strongest in Hong Kong/Singapore/Malaysia, though, so maybe it originated in advertising in Asia?
draw a fine line between (two similar things): The OED's first example of that is BrE in 1848; the GloWbE corpus now has more US examples than UK, but the numbers are very small.
fine-tip, fine-point (of a pen, etc.): much more AmE in GloWbE and NoW. (The number of hits for fine nib were tiny, but more in BrE. Fine-nibbed pen had more in AmE.)

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Labels: adjectives , idioms , law | 4 comments

balk and baulk

Jun 10, 2025

Over on Bluesky last month, I was pulled into a conversation that went something like this:

Someone tweets a screenshot of a comment with the phrase Do you baulk at the film reviews...?
Someone American asks "how long have y'all been adding a u to balk?"
And then, predictably, some respondents say it's always been there, Noah Webster took it out.

That's the point where someone (c'est moi!) looked into it and reported back:

The Oxford English Dictionary has it as balk. Since it comes from Old English, it only got a 'u' after French had influenced (I am tempted to say 'infected') the spelling system. The 'u' came into the word in the 1600s and 1700s, and today the spelling is very mixed in BrE. British National Corpus has 21 baulked/13 balked, more recent Corpus of Global Web-Based English has 71 baulked/93 balked in BrE. Cambridge, Chambers & Collins Dictionary all list balk first as does the Guardian Style Guide.

Most u/non-u variations in BrE and AmE involve an o—as in words like colo(u)r and mo(u)ld. The variation can probably be blamed on Samuel Johnson as much as Noah Webster. In the 18th-century, not all British dictionaries put a u in words like colo(u)r, but Johnson did, and his dictionary became far more famous than the others, so the u form eventually became standard in BrE. I write about the ou/o spellings at this old post (and much more and much better in in The Prodigal Tongue). But even Johnson spelled balk without the u.

My attention to the -o(u)- words in the book meant I overlooked balk/baulk—but I used the word balked in chapter 7:

...please seemed inappropriate in the small request situation, and so Americans balked at it.

The British copyeditor did not bat an eyelash—or a blue pencil—at it.

Given the dictionaries' agreement, we can say that balk is the "standard" spelling of the verb in BrE. Given the corpus numbers, we can say that it is the "normal" spelling. Given the word's history, we can say it is the "original" spelling.

But those corpus numbers aren't so distinct, and given the conversation on Bluesky, it seems that some BrE writers really want to spell it with a u (and to believe that that is the "standard/normal/original" way to spell it). This may well be another instance of British spelling changing in recent decades in order to fight against perceptions but not realities of a British/American spelling difference.*

Confusion about its spelling is understandable, though, since there is a noun that is more usually spelled/spelt baulk. It's part of a billiard-type game table, and the term is used in several terms in several such games.

Overhead view of a pool table with the leftmost edge labelled 'baulk cushion' and the first 1/5 or so of the surface labelled "baulk"

Illustration from International 8 Ball Referee

I searched for several of these terms as either balk or baulk in Corpus of Global Web-Based English and got only the u spelling—with none of them in AmE:

Corpus of Global Web-Based English results showing 16 UK hits for baulk line and 4 for baulk cushion, but no hits for either in US.

(Britannica.com has it as balk. They're owned by the same company as Merriam-Webster. Is the ghost of Noah W. removing U's in the encyclop[a]edia?)

So, in general, if it's a [billiards] noun, it's baulk and if it's a verb it's balk. They both come from the same Old English word, with a Germanic ancestor.

The one other -aulk word in current English is caulk (used much more in AmE than BrE, which tends to say seal/sealant instead)—but that came into English with the u, as it came from French cauquer in the 1500s.

The post-Norman urge to stick a U in balk also affected talk and stalk in the 1600s, but not, apparently walk. For me, the mystery is: why has the urge to stick a U in persisted for baulk and not the others?

----

*I say 'another' instance of spelling change due to perceptions of 'Americanism' because I discuss the main instance of that phenomenon in detail in The Prodigal Tongue:

(And I'm going to leave that complicated situation/history for readers of the book. Or listeners to it!)

===POSTSCRIPT 12 APRIL 2026===

I can't imagine when I'll have enough billiards content to support another post, so I'm just going to slide this item in. The Wordle solution earlier this week was CAROM, a word I didn't know, though when I got thoroughly stuck, I managed to pull it from somewhere in my subconscious:

Neil W emailed me to point out that this is a billiards term, which appears to be more American. The OED says of the noun:

A stroke in Billiards; = carambole n. 2; now also called cannon n.1 III.11.

But the verb ('To strike or glance and rebound') they mark as American, and the Corpus of Global Web-Based English seems to bear this out:

Labels: games , spelling , sport , verbs | 27 comments

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!

PS: Maybe I should have done singulars as well as plurals, but I was worried about singular versions infecting the data. But when I checked the first 20 a bunch of, only one was literal, so maybe not:

And, of course, I should have looked up the BrE spelling tonne, but there are fewer of those:

And sh*load(s) of has come up in the comments, so you can see here that shedload is pretty British:

PPS: Over on Bluesky, Graham Burton shared some relevant tables with data from the British National Corpus, from his co-authored book The Big Beasts of English Grammar

Labels: AusE , CanE , IrishE , numbers , NZE | 23 comments

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