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If you're looking for discussion of other (o)e or (a)e words , please click here to see/comment at the more comprehensive post on the topic . So, as we've seen in that aforementioned blog post, British and American spelling differ sometimes in the use of the ligature (connected letter) œ , or as it's more often written now, the digraph (two letters for one sound) oe . To give a quick summary of the story so far: English took a lot of its œ words from Latin. Latin got them from Greek. œ is Latin's way of representing the Greek oɩ . American English (following Noah Webster and other spelling reformers) usually simplifies the Latin/Greek oe to e .  But then there's foetus (or fœtus ). This is a British spelling of the Latin word fetus . That is to say, the œ might look like it comes from a classical language, but it just doesn't. Sometime in the 16th century, someone (mistakenly, one might say) started spelling it with an œ , and it stuck. This creates a dil...

Emma , an English friend now living in Canada, asked me: Have you ever looked at measuring tape/tape measure for UK/US? A Canadian friend said she uses the first for the bendy fabric kind and the second for the more rigid, retractable builders' kind. And I said ' That's how I do it too. What do you do? '  Since this was on Facebook, I now know that I know four Englishpeople who say tape measure for both. Everyone who's commented so far follows the English/North American division that Emma and her Canadian friend observed. In other words, I learned to call this a measuring tape : Photo by Ben Watkins: https://www.flickr.com/photos/falcifer/ and this a tape measure : Photo by redjar: https://www.flickr.com/photos/redjar/with/136165399/ ...and my BrE-speaking friends call them both tape measure . What's interesting is that neither the North American semantic distinction nor the North America/UK difference is recorded in most dictionaries. They (both UK and US o...

In case you weren't paying attention, the UK had a general election yesterday, and the exit polls and final results were a surprise, given that the previous day's polls had indicated a much closer result. Because this is a language blog, I'm going to stick with a language observation, however tempting it is to do otherwise... David S in the US emailed me with the following this morning: Some time within the last year or so I started noticing the distinctive usage of the phrase "shock poll" in the British news media; since then it seems to have migrated to the US, though apparently not in major news outlets. It appears so far as I can tell to mean simply "poll with startling results", with adjectival "shock". Some googling shows that "shock survey" and "shock study" are out there as well. Is this use of "shock" as an adjective in fact coming out of British newspaperese, and is its usage spreading beyond a de...