In this weekly post, we bring more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary to English language learners. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s language tip is about the patterns that follow the noun possibility.

The noun possibility is never followed by an infinitive. Use the pattern the/a possibility of doing something:
✗ New technology offers the possibility to put very large dictionaries onto a single compact disc.
✓ New technology offers the possibility of putting very large dictionaries onto a single compact disc.
✗ With more flexible working hours, staff now have the possibility to build their own working conditions.
✓ With more flexible working hours, staff now have the possibility of building their own working conditions.

You can also use possibility in the following patterns:
▪  possibility of something
▪  possibility that
The possibility of a move to the coast was considered.
There is a real possibility that the government could be defeated.

English has a jumbled inheritance of words from many sources; the pie chart shows a statistical analysis based on dictionary etymologies. Even simple contrasting word pairs, such as in and out, may come from different sources: in is a Latinate word, and out is Germanic.

Despite their disparate origins, you can usually count on words that incorporate in and out to be opposites, and this pattern usually holds true as well for words that begin with in- (im- before certain consonants) and have a corresponding word beginning with ex-, a Latin preposition meaning “out.” The exceptions to the rule – where the “opposite” word is not really opposite in meaning – provide some interesting opportunities for English vocabulary exploration and expansion.

Let’s start with a simple, straightforward pair: inhale and exhale. You could hardly have one without the other, as every living creature knows, and we designate the products of these two verbs with another pair of equal opposites: in-breath and out-breath. You can take this pattern and run with it, finding along the way many word pairs in which what’s in forms a complement to what’s out: include/exclude, implicit/explicit, intern/extern, intrinsic/extrinsic, introvert/extrovert, import/export. The same dependable pattern of opposites holds for many English compounds that incorporate in and out: inboard/outboard, indoor/outdoor, inpatient/outpatient, infield/outfield. Compounds formed by fusing the parts of phrasal verbs also often represent opposite meanings: input/output, inflow/outflow, check-in/checkout, fade-in/fade-out, inbreeding/outbreeding.

So much for the easy stuff. What about the word pairs in which one member is far more common than the other, or has a meaning not at all expected from the meaning of its “opposite number”? These are the word pairs that provide an opportunity for a better understanding of the ways in which English words relate to each other.

You’re probably familiar with infect, and probably aware that English has no word exfect. There is, however, a word that is the etymological counterpart of infect, and that word is effect: before some consonants, the ex- prefix becomes ef-, or simply e-. The interesting thing here, however, is why infect seems to be more than poles apart in meaning from effect. What’s the explanation? The disparity in meaning is partly due to the fact that effect was used as a noun in English before it was used as a verb. If you look at the core meaning of effect as a noun, however – a change produced in something by another thing – you can see how an effect might be the result after infect has done its magic. A couple of other pairs in which ex- is disguised but in which you can probably find the connection with the corresponding in- word are inject/eject and infuse/effuse.

It’s likely that you have several other in- and ex- pairs stored in quite distant locations in your memory bank because their meanings don’t seem to marry up well with each other, but exploring the meanings of the words, while you have your thinking cap on, can reveal some interesting connections. Try this with insist/exist, inhibit/exhibit, inspect/expect, inspire/expire, impose/expose, and intend/extend. In some cases you’ll find that the words started off their careers in English with more or less opposite meanings, but then a later meaning eventually pushed aside the earlier meaning. This is the case with incite/excite, which today have meanings that overlap a great deal, but were originally more opposed to one another.

Some in- and out- pairs also provide interesting material for word exploration, but their contrast in meaning is more often due to the fact that they appeared in English centuries apart and for different reasons. Some pairs that fit this description are intake/out-take, income/outcome, and in-law/outlaw.

In this weekly post, we bring more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary to English language learners. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s language tip is about how to spell the inflections of develop.

Don’t write the -ed and -ing forms of develop with a double ‘p’. The correct spellings are developed and developing:
✗ We live in a world where everything is developping rapidly.
✓ We live in a world where everything is developing rapidly.

Don’t spell develop with a final ‘e’ (or development with an ‘e’ in the middle):
✗ As technology developes, we may find better solutions to diseases such as AIDS.
✓ As technology develops, we may find better solutions to diseases such as AIDS.

In this weekly post, we bring English language learners useful tips on tricky areas of the language. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s language tip is about the differences in pronunciation between Corp. and corps.

Here in the UK, there is a long-running news story involving Rupert Murdoch and his news empire.  The name of Mr Murdoch’s empire is ‘News Corporation’ and is commonly shortened to ‘News Corp.’, Corp. being the accepted shortening of the word corporation. There is extensive coverage of this story on the radio and television and I have noticed that some of the newsreaders are having a little bit of trouble pronouncing this shortened word.

One of the many interesting things about the English language is how influenced it is by other languages.  There is a word corps, which derives from the French word for body and is pronounced like the English word core.  Both corps and corpse derive from the same Latin root, corpus, meaning ‘body’; but we also commonly use corps itself to refer to a ‘body’ of people working together (although corps actually comes via the French corps d’armée).  Examples are army corps, diplomatic corps and press corps.  Perhaps this is where the confusion over ‘News Corp.’ stems from.  Even though the term press corps is in common usage, ‘News Corp.’ should most definitely have a ‘p’ sound at the end, as it refers to the word corporation and not the word corps.

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Though it has never been discovered, there must be, resting somewhere on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, a box of words that lost their way in the perilous journey from British to American English, or in some cases, in the reverse direction. This would handily explain the disparities among a number of compound terms that differ between the two dialects. There are many cases where one dialect uses a compound term to designate the thing that the other dialect names with a single word. In other cases, both dialects use a compound term, but one component of the compound doesn’t match.

I was thinking about this the other day after reading Solange’s query about corn on Stan’s post that mentioned linguistic narrowing. If you compare the British and American entries for corn in the Macmillan dictionary, you’ll see a disparity in sense 1. When Americans say ‘corn,’ they mean maize, whether the word appears alone or in compounds. When British speakers use ‘corn,’ it’s usually to talk about cereal crops generally. The OED has this note about the differences:

Corn- in combinations, in American usage, must therefore be understood to mean maize, whereas in English usage it may mean any cereal; e.g. a cornfield in England is a field of any cereal that is grown in the country, in U.S. one of maize.

This results in corn dolly and Corn Laws being about grain, while corn dogs and cornflakes are about maize. All this came about because English settlers saw and wrote about the ‘corn’ that Native Americans were growing and called it Indian Corn. As John Winthrop, an Englishman who was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony put it in 1630: “Though we have not beef and mutton, &c. yet (God be praised) . . . our Indian corn answers for all.” Americans eventually dropped the “Indian” modifier; it still turns up occasionally in British English. You could say that Indian corn is an early retronym.

Another retronym with a less colorful paper trail is push bike – by which Brits sometimes designate a bicycle, presumably to distinguish it from a motorcycle. Push bike is not used in the US; Americans just say bike for the kind that you pedal – and occasionally for the motorized kind – depending on context to disambiguate the two. Interestingly though, both dialects reserve biker for motorcyclists, and cyclist for bicyclists.

Readers over a certain age will think first of music when they see the word Motown. Americans may be surprised to learn that this genre of music is sometimes called Tamla Motown in the UK. This reflects the fact that the founder of Motown records, Berry Gordy Jr., began two record labels, the first being Tamla, in 1959 – a fact lost to American popular consciousness, but preserved in the British compound term.

Americans who want to give the impression that they’ve done something as if by magic can say “Presto!” Presto is an interjection that’s labelled ‘mainly American’ in the Macmillan Dictionary, because you have to say “Hey presto!” in Britain to achieve the same effect. The reasons for this are unclear, but “Hey presto!” has documented evidence back to the 18th century.

You may want to pit your wits against the terms below and test your transatlantic compound skills. All of the terms share one component, which should make the meanings easy to match,  but do you know which ones are British and which American?

In this weekly post, we bring more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary to English language learners. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s language tip is about the differences in use between whether and if.

Both whether and if can be used to introduce indirect questions of the type that expect a ‘yes/no’ answer: She asked if/whether I liked jazz.
Use whether, but not if, before an infinitive: She can’t decide whether to marry him.
Use whether, but not if, after a preposition: There are doubts about whether the system is safe.
Use whether, but not if, immediately before ‘or not’: The question is whether or not the government has the right to interfere.
Whether is generally preferred when ‘or’ appears later in the sentence, but you can also use if: It is not clear whether/if the information was stolen or deliberately leaked to the press.

Stan’s recent post on poppycock, bunkum, and similar words includes a huge collection of synonyms. They’re not identical in every respect: there are differences in regional distribution (some are used very widely, others only locally), in register (some being more formal, others verging on the offensive), and in currency (with some fading from use, and others very much alive). But in semantic terms, they are completely synonymous: they are all different ways of referring to the same idea (in this case, “nonsense”).

The interesting thing is that true synonymy is extremely rare. There are very few pairs (or sets) of words which have exactly the same meaning. “Nonsense” is one of a small group of exceptions – concepts which, for some reason, attract large numbers of words and phrases. If you need to say that something is badly organized and ended in failure, the lexicon provides a range of options (like shambles, cock-up, or disaster), which all do pretty much the same job. Equally, you’ll have a wealth of expressions at your disposal if you want to describe someone as stupid or annoying (idiot, muppet, clown, moron etc), pregnant, rich, drunk, crazy, or dead. Monty Python’s famous dead parrot sketch reaches a climax as the aggrieved customer runs through a long list of colourful phrases, all of which express exactly the same idea: the parrot is, unequivocally, dead. And just as you can’t be partially dead, you can’t be a little bit pregnant either. Here again, there are plenty of choices, and – like the Monty Python customer – people sometimes enjoy going through the repertoire  if they feel the situation calls for a little emphasis, as in this extract from a novel in our corpus:

“I’m having a baby myself”. “You’re what?” Hugh seemed genuinely shocked. “Pregnant,” Caitlin repeated, with some irritation. “You know, bun in the oven, with child, up the duff, about to drop one …”

There are degrees of formality here, and dictionaries generally give enough information about register and style (is it formal, colloquial, impolite, or whatever?) to enable users to choose one that fits the context. But, as we have observed before, they don’t always provide an adequate account of pragmatics. For example, you can say someone is up the duff or that they will soon be hearing the patter of tiny feet, and there is no real difference in meaning. The first expression is labelled “impolite” in the dictionary, the second “humorous”  – but there is more to it than that. The patter of tiny feet has positive connotations (the example sentence in our entry hints at this), whereas if you select the phrase up the duff, you’re implying that the pregnancy is unwanted or inappropriate.

So for people who aren’t familiar with these phrases and might want to use them, a little pragmatic information would complete the picture. But it’s worth saying again that these concepts (dead, pregnant, nonsense etc) are the exceptions. In most cases, there is a single word or phrase for each meaning you need to encode – which is a sensible design feature for a language because it keeps the load on the speaker’s memory to a minimum. The choice, in other words, is which of several near-synonyms is most appropriate in a given situation, rather than which of several exact synonyms you feel like using. Before we had access to corpus data, it was quite a challenge to identify the differences (often very subtle differences) between words of roughly the same meaning. Older dictionaries would use synonyms as a way of defining words, so you might find clever defined as “intelligent, bright”, with similar “circular” definitions for other members of the set. But with large amounts of language data (and smart software) at our disposal, the differences reveal themselves pretty clearly. As for those exceptions to the general “rule” that exact synonyms don’t really exist, we’d be interested in hearing of any others you can think of.

In this weekly post, we bring more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary to English language learners. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s language tip is about two words that are easily confused, whether and weather.

Notice the spelling of the conjunction whether, and don’t confuse it with the noun weather, which sounds exactly the same.
✗ It does not matter wheather one is an optimist or a pessimist.
✓ It does not matter whether one is an optimist or a pessimist.
✗ The question is wether there is still a place for imagination in the world.
✓ The question is whether there is still a place for imagination in the world.
✗ … the issue of weather criminals need retribution or rehabilitation.
✓ … the issue of whether criminals need retribution or rehabilitation.

Michael Rundell noted in his post a couple of weeks ago that there was a clear British/American divide in the use of the expression “Thanks a bunch”: it’s often used sincerely in American English, but ironically in British. That distinction, in one respect, is the tip of an iceberg: the iceberg of adverbial modification. In fact there are many ways in which Brits and Yanks express the degree to which they do, love, hate, esteem, disparage, or qualify something in ways that differ only by a word or two. The points of difference are all adverbials, that is, single words or expressions that modify a verb or modify another modifier. Many of these adverbials can be called intensifiers because they serve to make the meaning of the word they modify stronger, just as “a bunch” does with “thanks”.

As a point of departure, I’ll begin with something I’m pretty sure about: if you use the expression “pretty sure,” there’s a 2:1 chance that you’re an American, or under the influence of American English. The expression occurs in most varieties of English, but Americans are more likely to be pretty sure – or to remark that something is pretty good, pretty cool, or pretty darn close – because pretty is the intensifier of choice in informal American English. Why is this?

It may be because Americans are rather reluctant to use rather as an intensifier. To Americans, rather in front of an adjective sounds a bit formal and a bit British. Though this may seem rather odd, rather strange, or rather silly, the British use of rather is much more frequent than American in rather + adjective collocations such as these.

I know that I’m quite right about that because corpus data makes it quite clear. Corpus data also makes it quite clear that Brits are, quite simply, wild about saying things like “quite right” and “quite clear” – and of course, “quite simply.” Americans, on the other hand, are more likely to opt for “pretty clear,” and to just say “right” when someone or something is right, rather than modifying the adjective, because technically, “right” shouldn’t really admit of degrees: perhaps Americans are inclined to think that something is either right, or it’s not.

Whether you quite agree with that will depend on which variety of English you’re most comfortable with; Americans and Brits don’t quite agree on what quite means. The usage note in the Macmillan Dictionary puts it this way:

In British English quite usually means ‘fairly’: The film was quite enjoyable, although some of the acting was weak. When American speakers say quite, they usually mean ‘very’: We’ve examined the figures quite thoroughly. Speakers of British English sometimes use quite to mean ‘very’, but only before words with an extreme meaning: The whole experience was quite amazing.

That’s a fairly accurate way of expressing the differences in usage (as an American is inclined to say), but you could also say that it’s somewhat  accurate, rather accurate, quite accurate or pretty accurate. In all of those cases, you might be giving hints as to where your allegiance lies, but you wouldn’t be revealing your linguistic identity unambiguously. If you were to say that it was mighty accurate though, you’d be giving yourself away, because Brits don’t use mighty as an intensifier except when they’re sending up Americans. Corpus data shows many instances of “mighty fine” in British English, but they’re nearly all examples of Brits poking fun at Americans. That’s the other side of the coin from Americans being able to intimate Britishness in a light-hearted way by simply saying “Oh, rather!” or “Oh, quite!”

In this weekly post, we bring more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary to English language learners. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult.

This week’s language tip helps with the spelling of nouns whose related adjective ends in ‘y’.

Although the adjective happy ends in the letter ‘y’, the related noun happiness is spelled with an ‘i’ (not a ‘y’):

✗ Health, love, and happyness are what everyone looks for in their life.

✓ Health, love, and happiness are what everyone looks for in their life.

For most other adjectives ending in ‘y’, the same rule applies: