British words which stump americans

It's interesting to compare forms of words -- side-by-side -- in the two dialects. A few examples:. Syntactic differences.

The following compare -- side by side -- particular grammatical phenomena in the two dialects. These are just a random sample of quick examples; hundreds of other phenomena could be studied in more depth. We can also search for very "narrow" phenomena, like the following:. Semantic differences. We can tell a lot about the meaning of words by the "collocates" nearby words with which they occur. Consider the following differences in meaning:. In American English, though, it refers to the British serviette , and this shows up with collocates referring to food and dining, like cocktail, silverware, plates , and cups.

In British English, it would be a knob of butter , right? Notice newer words like memory stick as well, which won't occur in a 20 year old corpus like the BNC. Any ideas? BTW, what are these called in England? This shows the value of having up-to-date texts that reflect recent changes in the language. Imagine if we were using tiny corpora of just two million words or so for each dialect. Candy floss. Faff, or faff ing about. Jam sandwich.

Throw a wobbly. Give us feedback. Read Next View. Hampton by Hilton London Park Royal. Eccleston Square Hotel. Georgian Guest House. Lansbury Heritage Hotel. The Congresbury Arms. Luxury Historic House. A Room With A View. Hampton by Hilton Manchester Northern Quarter. High Hedges Guest House. Show More. By convention tree diameter is measured at 1. From the Cambridge English Corpus. The stumps were set in a matrix of regenerating vegetation and remnants of primary forest.

Approximately 1 cm was removed from the top of the stumps to avoid contamination, and the tissues underneath were sampled. Values in parentheses are numbers and percentages last column of stumps containing at least one living sprout.

Logging gaps were found by walking the skid trails and locating old tree stumps. On one estate 'raw stumps were stuck into the ground and described as one year rubber'. The trap presents an alternative to time-consuming excavation of stumps for the host and its parasitoid. The netting diameter allows easy access of rainwater as well as light and wind and sufficient heat transfer such that it maintains conditions similar to those around uncovered stumps.

As we all know, when stumped by some difficult conscious and linguistically formulated problem, it often helps to sleep on it, or to turn our conscious thinking to other matters. The main economic impact is caused when weevils emerge from stumps on clearfell areas and feed on the bark of the main stems of young conifers replanted on the area.

The trees have "spectral arms," their branches are "disfigured with wounds" and rotting stumps are compared with "black teeth [rising] from green gums" ; ch. In places the contact between tuff and ignimbrite coincides with the in situ and in growth position stumps of petrified trees. In the 0. See all examples of stump. These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web.

Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors. Translations of stump in Chinese Traditional. See more. Need a translator? Translator tool.