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Finally, the last of my Words of the Year. I declared two US-to-UK words this year because both ( awesome and bake-off ) seemed very much 'of 2014'. In the case of the UK-to-US words, I also gave up on deciding between two excellent nominations, though the case for '2014ness' is not quite as strong. We've been seeing a lot more Britishisms in the US for some years now.  The other UK-to-US Word of the Year ( dodgy ) and today's have been nominated before. (I'm grateful to Nancy Friedman for making both these apt and informative nominations.) They are worming their way in rather than making a big splash. But in both cases it seems to be time to acknowledge them. So the UK-to-US Noun of the Year is: gap year That is, a year off from education between school and (AmE) college /(BrE) university . (If your first reaction is 'but that's not a word!', please go straight to the bottom of this post for a linguistic schooling.) Why is this worthy of the t...

As we've already established, this was an indecisive year for me, and I've already announced two Words of the Year, both adjectives:  US-to-UK awesome and UK-to-US dodgy . Of course, many words go back and forth between the two countries each year, and these have been building up usage in their non-native lands for years, but they felt 'of 2014' for various reasons discussed in their posts. Another word with American origins was bigger than ever in the UK in 2014, and a UK-to-US noun had a very good case made for it for timeliness. So to the adjectives we add the Nouns of the Year. First off, the US to UK: bake(-)off As in the BBC's: Before you say "but that's two words", I refer you to the hyphen above.  On every linguistic test, it is one word, a noun. But the British establishment has a higher tolerance than Americans do for what we in the word business call ' open compounds ' (as alluded to in this old post ). As Nancy Friedman wrote, w...

So the other day , when I decided to avoid difficult questions and not decide between my top two US-to-UK words of the year, I laid the groundwork for general indecisiveness. So, I might as well not be decisive about the UK-to-US words either. It works out well (I re (-) assure myself) because in the end I will have a Noun of the Year and an Adjective of the Year in both directions. (Orig AmE) Tough luck , verbs. And the UK-to-US Adjective of the Year is: dodgy ...which was nominated by Gina the Great , Anonymous in New Jersey, and Peter Mork (in a previous year). It is timely because this is the year that Ben Yagoda at Not One-Off Britishisms declared that " Dodgy is ensconced " in response to this headline in the Wall Street Journal : When asked which British words I now can't live without, I usually mention dodgy . What did I say before? It's got such a feeling to it, and has to be translated by different words for different contexts in AmE. Take, for example, t...

Thanks to all who have nominated US-to-UK and UK-to-US words for the annual Words of the Year (AmE) fest . The decisions were difficult, and so I am going to cheat and have two US-to-UK words . I can do that, because I'm the (orig. AmE) boss . And the first one is: awesome And in a coincidence that you probably won't believe (it's true!) my BrE-speaking child has just looked up from her (arguably orig. AmE) video game to say "That was awesome. I cooked an egg!" Of course, awesome is not a new word in any English. It's been used to mean either 'full of awe' or 'inspiring awe' for centuries. But its use as enthusiastic praise of any little (or big) thing is originally American; the earliest [alleged] example of it in the OED is from 1961 in the now-defunct women's magazine McCall's : He looked up to see Mrs. Kirby, awesome in a black-and-yellow polka-dotted slicker, bearing down on him. This use of awesome really came into its own (in ...