British Words Quiz #2

In Britain "dodgy" does not mean "sketchy". Dodgy is a word ascribed to something or an action that is morally and/or legally dubious. Sketchy usually means vague or incomplete but never dodgy.

your definition of "dodgy" is my exact definition of "sketchy." American: That guy that i met in the alley was pretty sketchy. British: That bloke i met in the alley was a dodgy fellow. I would say they are about the same.

In Britain, you wouldn't say "that bloke I met in the alley". You would say "that bloke I met in the alleyway".

Don't go down that alley if you keep meeting dodgy blokes!

But we're using the American word to translate to British, not the other way around. In America, the way we use sketchy in the same way you use dodgy. The Oxford dictionary probably wouldn't include the American definition of sketchy.

It confuses me greatly why americans only use pounds and not stones... also do they really not use the word bin?

Why would it confuse you that Americans don't use stones for measurement. To my knowledge, almost the entire world uses kilos or pounds and not stone aside from the UK. That would be like me being confused (as an American) as to why the rest of the world uses the metric system. I know we are weird but I don't assume that everyone else is wrong just because we choose to be different.

Pounds are a unit of weight in the English system of units. So are stone. Thus the confusion. Pounds and kilograms are from different systems.
English units

He didn't say we're WRONG, he just said he was confused.

Also, I'm confused as to why WE don't use the metric system.

smartcookie17 because we dont like changing things. And also, if we did change it officially, everyone would keep using the metric system anyway, so it would just be a waste of time. To be honest, I'm quite happy standing out from the other 200 and something countries

Except England doesn't really use "English" units. Its called Imperial mostly and we have a weird hybrid of Metric and Imperial units for different things (also depending on age). For example I would measure short distance in cm and meters and never use pounds or stone, yards or gallons; but use Miles per Hour.

Also we still use pints but not gallons

We already use metrics in some places - the pharmaceutical industry has used it for a long time, (you don't get a tsp of vaccine in your flu shot,) auto mechanics who also work on foreign cars must have two sets of wrenches, and the FDA requires dual labeling on food and drugs. If they would start having schools use a dual system so students would know both systems, and require both systems printed on new replacements for such things as road signs, it would be much easier to slowly change over in the future without a huge cost of conversion. I think it's a much easier system, but it's my understanding the greatest argument against it is the cost of retooling manufacturing plants and construction businesses. I'm guessing those involved in international trade have already added metrics to their businesses. I hope we someday change.

To answer Samwise, the English system is goofy enough even with the simplified version that Americans use. Makes perfect sense to get rid of some of the intermediary units like drams and stones and only use some like pounds and tons. Would make even more sense to adopt the metric system, but Americans are stubborn sometimes.

I remember back in the late '70s or early '80s there was a big push to change us over to the metric system. We were told we were changing over within a year, and I taught a class on it to our extension club. Those gentle ladies turned into wild, rebellious women. Some moaned, some ranted, but not one said they would accept it, and they didn't even try to learn it. I thought it was a lot easier, personally, but the attempt to switch us over turned into a disaster nationwide, and to my knowledge no one has made the attempt since. (However, the medical field and liquor industry operate on metrics, we are used to hearing about 5K runs, my measuring cups now read with both, so we are slowly being conditioned toward acceptance.)

it confuses me why anyone would use stones and not just go with the metric system.

Yeah, just go metric! Like NZ - in 1969. (But it was much easier to introduce change to a country of just 3 million people).

The UK is special. So it needs a weird hybrid system.

Okay, like half of these are wrong...... Don't get me wrong I live in London. We never ever say serviette, that's French. We say napkin or paper towel. I don't know what spanner is, but we say wrench. For us, it's drunk driving and we also say Fat Tuesday. Most of the UK uses kilos, any way.

Agreed about the napkin which is much more widely used in Britain than serviette. I would always say napkin. I've never heard anyone say wrench in the UK - we do not use it as standard, it's almost universally spanner in any garage I've ever been to as well as the DIY shops. It's also typically drink driving, but maybe "drunk driver".

Erikthev...a monkey wrench is called an adjustable spanner in the UK. I like 'monkey wrench' better.

The British English text books we have at the polytechnic I've been teaching at use "spanner," designated as UK English, and specifies "wrench" as American English. My British coworkers measure their own weight in stone. I've also heard them say "drink driving." Maybe you live in the American section of London? Though American culture is ubiquitous so Americanisms will start seeping in no matter where you live.

Usually in UK a person gives their weight in Stones & Pound eg '9stone 3pounds'. I think most of the scales that people weigh themselves on are marked in Stones & Pounds and its easier to remember than break it down to 129 pounds etc.

Erik and Helen, maybe you live in the humorless section of the UK?

All of the UK is humorless. Few parts of it are humourless.

Whether they can spell or not aside, I've run in to many Brits with no sense of humor including a few above, obviously.

@omgitsolivia1 - Wait, you've never heard of zee OR zed? What do you call that last letter of the alphabet then?

Are you sure you live in the UK? Where I am form you get ridiculed for calling a spanner a wrench... well for using most American English to be honest (not in a bad way but in a you should now when to use which kind of way)

And yet we’re the other way around where I came from in Yorkshire. The choice is napkin (cloth) or paper napkin which is also called a serviette...

There are like a thousand different dialects in England, why is London the measuring stick for what is "trve English"?

British words? Don't you mean proper english words

Not at all. There is absolutely no basis for calling the dialect British English "proper English." Though English is a living dynamic language and thus it is completely erroneous to assume that newer forms are more degenerate or less pure, if we make that assumption, then American English has changed far less over the last four hundred years than British English has. There are 5x more people in the USA than there are in the UK, and all over the world most people learning English prefer learning American English over British English, as American is the preferred standard. Also, the entire reason that English remains relevant today and is considered the international language is certainly not because of England. If not for the USA we would no doubt be communicating in German, Japanese, Russian, Spanish or Mandarin right now. Though how we would be doing so without the American-invented Internet is a mystery.

I think that it's a broad assumption to say that people "prefer to learn American English"! In Australia we use all the same words you have here for "English", except "Lorry". We also use English spelling (eg.colour, labour etc.). I think in countries where English is not the main language they may learn English from, or be influenced by, American movies, television and other media, which would explain the Americanisms. I notice little kids here often use Americanisms but they usually grow out of it as they get older. Oh, and before we adopted the metric system, we also used "Stone" as a form of weight. Most of us in our 40s and over still say our weight in Stone, and baby birth weights are still often spoken about in pounds.

It's broad but it's not an assumption. I've worked as an English teacher all over the world and apart from some Commonwealth countries like Australia and most countries in Western Europe, American English is preferred. The number of those in the former category is falling all the time. Why do people learn English? Because they want to do business with American companies, they want to attend American schools, they enjoy American popular culture, and so on. The reasons don't matter that much. The end result is the same. The majority of informed linguists will back up what I said above. There is no standard or "proper" English dialect but if there were one American English has a stronger case for being it than British English does.

LOL! Quite a discussion you're having in the comments section of an obscure quiz on an obscure website.

Amm...much as I hate to say it, being both British and Australian, the British way of spelling many words is arguably less 'correct' than the American way. For example, words ending in -or in American and -our in British generally come from the Latin, in which they were spelled (or spelt, if you prefer) -or. When those words were put through the Norman filter they attracted the (superfluous) 'u', so in fact the American spelling is closer to the original. The same is often true of words containing double vowels, such as oesophagus, archaeology and leukaemia, though the reason for this is more complicated and involves the transition from Greek diphthongs to Latin monophthongs and, frankly, I'm beginning to bore myself...

The internet is American invented, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.

Amm: wrong
Lcfr: yes that's what I said. France being in Western Europe.
AfroChick: ignorant and wrong
lam: common but laughably erroneous misconception you are propping up there. The World Wide Web is not the Internet. The Internet absolutely is an American invention.
kdc: I understand both. I hope you're responding to Connor. He's the insufferable dingbat asserting (incorrectly) that the funny degenerate dialect he speaks is "proper" English.
Pirellyn: no, absolutely not. Not even close. Read about it sometime.

It is interesting to consider why English is used so much as a lingua franca nowadays. To say it is mainly because of the USA would imply that without the USA it wouldn't be. Had the USA never existed at all (say if they just never declared independence from the British Empire) I think it is impossible to say how history might have played out. At first it seems an advantage to the British Empire - which might still be the most powerful country today in some possible outcomes. It is relatively clear that Canada and Australia would still be speaking English regardless of what happened to the USA - but their populations are comparatively pretty small. Who invented the Internet and the World Wide Web are relevant for the lingua franca of the Internet to a certain extent, but I doubt that if Hungarians had invented it first I would be typing this in Hungarian. I see the World Wide Web as a more significant invention though, as the Internet is just the ability of computers to communicate.

CaoMaur: it is impossible that AfroChick has experience that led to her discovering that British English is "Proper English" because that is simply flat out wrong. No amount of experience could make it otherwise. She is being ignorant by asserting this. As to her experience living all over Africa, I doubt that, but I'm sure many of the British Commonwealth countries there still use British English. And that's a good chunk of them.

The British Empire existed, yes, but then there was stuff that happened after that, you realize, right? If not for the USA the dominant superpower in the world would not be English-speaking. We would be speaking some other language because the British Empire would have long ago been overrun or rendered obsolete by the Nazis, the Soviets, the Imperial Japanese, or the Chinese. Or if none of that would have happened Spanish or Arabic or Hindi may have become more relevant. Take America out of the picture and history and the world would be very different

TWM: Before the World Wide Web was invented at CERN (Switzerland) in the 1990s, the Internet had already existed for decades in America. It was being used to conduct important research. We already had Internet domains, html, Internet pages (later came to be known as web pages), e-mail, Internet bulletin boards, usenet, news servers, Internet chat rooms, Internet dating, online gaming, and consumer Internet services like Prodigy, Compuserv, and America OnLine.

Literally all the world wide web did was to accelerate the commercialization of technology that had already long since existed. That's it. The biggest contribution that those who developed it made to the Internet was the invention of the hypertext link (which was significant, yes, but saying that this was more significant than the invention of the Internet itself is like giving credit to the guy who invented seat belts for inventing the automobile). Your smartphone today uses the Internet. It doesn't use the world wide web

And, though this is all fairly silly hypothetical, when I am talking about history without America what I am imagining is if all of the land mass that would become America simply up and vanished in 1776. Britain would have ceased getting anything from them, even the benefits of trade, and they would have no impact on the course of world events afterward. WW1 and WW2 would have played out differently. The Soviets would have had no significant rival. No Hollywood. No silicone valley. No New York City. No Detroit. No Apollo. No Manhattan Project. The innovations made there would have been made somewhere else if at all, and the center of gravity in the worldwide economy would have been in Russia or China or Germany.
If, on the other hand, the British Empire was able to somehow retain control over their colonies there instead of having them declare independence, that would be different.

final note: of course without the British Empire there would have been no USA. And it was the British Empire that started turning English into the lingua franca of the world. Still, one comes after the other. add emphasis on "started."

CaoMaru: To your first comment, I don't think it would be that way without America, though. Young men in India would be learning Chinese, Russian, German or Japanese. English would become a relic of their past the same way that Spanish is in the Philippines. The Spanish Empire colonized the Philippines and for hundreds of years Spanish was an official language there, but now, nobody speaks it anymore.

You honestly think that Britain would have won WW1 and WW2 without the US's involvement? You think they would have been able to beat Hitler and keep the Japanese from taking over India and Australia at the same time without Midway? And then been able to go toe to toe with the Soviets after that? I know that Europeans love to downplay the significance of what Americans meant for the final outcomes of those wars, but, really?

The Internet was invented in the United States of America. Full stop. It's not even ambiguous. Credit where credit is due. Read about it.

If you also make reference to "Scottish English" and "Irish English" then that seems reasonable. If you're using "English English" as another way of saying "proper English" through reduplication, then that's not accurate.

okay. But is Tramp?

got the "fat tuesday" and "drunk driving" ones wrong even though i'm English! never heard of a fat tuesday, and I call it drunk driving xD

Kept trying to enter widdershins for counterclockwise. Anticlockwise is much less interesting.

I've heard that word but never knew what it meant. Thanks for sharing!

Agreed, sketchy means indistinct, while dodgy means potentially illegal or illegitimate.

You aren't comparing UK words to UK words. In the US sketchy does mean dishonest or just on the edge of being illegal, so it seems that dodgy would be the UK equivalent.

You're reading the quiz wrong. You need to compare the American meaning of 'sketchy", i.e. disreputable, dishonest, almost illegal - and find a British word for the same thing, i.e. "dodgy".

rubbish! the dodgy iclue is fine and, like, totally works!

I am british and i never use the word serviette.

It is now considered bad form to use Serviette ....... Napkin is preferred.

That can't be true at all. Serviette is just fine in the UK, as is napkin.

i am British and we call knickers, pants as well so can you accept that please.

Spot on. The comments are amazing so many of my fellow countrymen just can't grasp the concept of this quiz.

Lots of people here getting their panties into a wad.

Don’t you mean getting their knickers in a twist? :D

never heard of serviette but the rest are correct

I have never heard anyone ever say serviette! we say handkercheif or tissue. although we may use dodgy in replace for sketchy sometimes but there is far too many other words we use instead of that so I would really not include that. half decent attempt

Serviette isn't used in place of handkerchief or tissue, it is what is placed on your lap in a restaurant or nowadays under your coffee cup or a pile on the counter in a café. I saw a lady giving a lecture to a group of young women on classy speech and she said not to use 'Serviette' but that 'Napkin' was now considered the approved term in upper circles. (for right or wrong)

Bit of trivia for you: the "cookie/biscuit" thing isn't as straightforward as biscuit meaning cookie. A cookie is actually a type of biscuit. Biscuits can be of any shape (most commonly round or rectangular), and usually hard in texture, whereas cookies are more crumbly, and always round, and usually contain chocolate chips or a similar filling. So a bourbon biscuit or a custard cream isn't a cookie, but a Maryland chocolate chip cookie is :)

Cookies aren't always round - there are bar cookies, ball cookies, and Christmas cookies are any shape the cutter makes - stars, Christmas trees, etc.There are tons of different recipes for cookies - peanut butter, jam print, thin mints, macaroons, oatmeal raisin, shortbread, ginger snaps, snickerdoodles,'nilla wafers, sugar cookies, sandwich cookies with filling (think Oreos), etc. Only chocolate chip cookies contain chocolate chips. I think our cookies are usually sweeter than your biscuits. Cookies can be hard, crisp, or they can be removed from the oven sooner and made chewy. They can be frosted or sprinkled with sugar and/or cinnamon or eaten plain. That's all up to personal preference. But I agree with you, biscuits and cookies don't exactly mean the same thing.

I wasn't sure about sketchy, so assumed it was another word for an etch a sketch...

'Fat Tuesday' or 'Shrove Tuesday' is actually more commonly called 'Pancake Day' here in the UK.

I tried 'Pancake Tuesday' but didn't get it.

Same! Pancake Tuesday is what I've always known.

As far as I am aware serviette is dieing out and handkerchief, tissue, paper towel and possible others are replacing it. The first time I heard it I was expecting something fancy only to be disappointed by a mere hanky.

Why not kerb instead of pavement? It's what I had heard it is called in the UK

The kerb is the edge of the pavement. Why speculate when a simple Google search could show you your error?

Because that's how insecure people roll.

I'm British, and I thought of most of the answers as correct, but I've always called them napkins

I'm from Singapore so I use both

In canada we use never use bin and we dont say takeaway. THAT MAKES NO SENSE!!

X-D

I think both the British and Americans deserve some recognition for their attempts to ruin the language.

American English is full of crazy things. For example, we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway.

Should really say English instead of British, in Scotland we don't say many of these at all

There are different dialects in America, too, but they're all still American.

No one says "serviette" other than rich people (in the UK they're called "middle class" or "posh"); 90% of people in the UK say "napkin". And Americans say "dodgy" as well, I don't think that's a British thing.

Is Shrove Tuesday not also known as Pancake Tuesday?

To add to this sketchy/dodgy debate. I'm British and grew up in the South West but now live in London, and in my usage of both words I would say they mean the exact same thing. I've only ever used the word sketchy to mean dodgy (unsafe, a bit weird etc). I've never heard of sketchy being used to refer to vague ever. Also, Shrove Tuesday = Pancake Day, not Pancake Tuesday.

I'm English and I haven't a clue what a 'Zed' is nor what a 'Zee' is, I must be missing something!

I'm american, and the only two reasons I know these are 1, from my username, you can probably tell that I read and watch Harry Potter constantly, and 2 I have relatives who are British.

I'm Australian and we use most of these words as well; except for 'Lorry' and 'Knickers'. Some other differences I know of: the English have 'duvets' and we have 'doonahs'. They also call 'capsicums' 'peppers', and 'zucchinis' they call 'courgettes'. The 'sidewalk' or 'pavement' is called a 'footpath' here. I also have absolutely no idea what 'Fat Tuesday' or 'Shrove Tuesday' is.

I had no idea Americans called Shrove Tuesday "Fat Tuesday!"

Who than says Mardi Gras?

The French or people in New Orleans?

Never thought how much less embarrassing it must be to be caught with your pants down in the USA than the UK ;)

Okay, yes, in Britain, a biscuit and a cookie are two distinctly different things, but what British people would call a biscuit, American people would call a cookie.

What is Fat Tuesday about?