16 Books on Britishisms, Canadianisms, etc. (Recommended books - alt.usage.english)
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This article is from the alt.usage.english FAQ, by Mark Israel misrael@scripps.edu with numerous contributions by others.
16 Books on Britishisms, Canadianisms, etc. (Recommended books - alt.usage.english)
There are many *hundreds* of differences between British and
American English. From time to time, we get threads in which
each post mentions *one* of these differences. Because such a
thread can go on for ever, it's helpful to delimit the topic
more narrowly.
The books to get are "The Hutchinson British/American Dictionary"
by Norman Moss (Arrow, 1990, ISBN 0-09-978230-8); "British English,
A to Zed" by Norman W. Schur (Facts on File, 1987, ISBN
0-8160-1635-6); and "Modern American Usage" by H. W. Horwill
(OUP, 2nd ed., 1935).
You can order British books from Bookpages at
<http://www.bookpages.co.uk>, and U.S. books from Amazon Books at
<http://www.amazon.com>.
Jeremy Smith (jeremy@peak.org) has compiled his own
British-American dictionary, available on the WWW at
<http://www.peak.org/~jeremy/dictionary/dict.html>. He plans to
publish it as a paperback. There is another British-American
dictionary, maintained by Mark Horn (ttwy08a@prodigy.com), at
<http://pages.prodigy.com/NY/NYC/britspk/main.html>.
For Australian English, see "The Macquarie Dictionary of
Australian Colloquial Language" (Macquarie, 1988,
ISBN 0-949757-41-1); "The Macquarie Dictionary" (Macquarie, 1991,
ISBN 0-949757-63-2); "The Australian National Dictionary" (Oxford
University Press, 1988, ISBN 0-19-55736-5); or "The Dinkum
Dictionary" (Viking O'Nell, 1988, ISBN 0-670-90419-8). You can
order Australian books from the Australian Online Bookshop at
<http://www.bookworm.com.au>. Robert P. O'Shea
(rpo@wjh.harvard.edu) has an online dictionary at
<http://visionlab.harvard.edu/members/robert/slang.html>.
For New Zealand English, there's the "Heinemann New Zealand
Dictionary", ed. H. W. Orseman (Heinemann, 1979, ISBN
0-86863-373-9); and "A Personal Kiwi-Yankee Slanguage Dictionary",
by Louis S. Leland Jr. (McIndoe, 1987, ISBN 0-86868-001-X).
For South African English, see "A Dictionary of South African
English", ed. Jean Branford (OUP, 3rd ed., 1987, ISBN
0-19-570427-4).
For Canadian English, see "A Dictionary of Canadianisms on
Historical Principles" (Gage, 1967, ISBN 0-7715-1976-1); the
"Penguin Canadian Dictionary" (Copp, 1990, ISBN 0-670-81970-0); or
the "Gage Canadian Dictionary" (Gage, 1997, ISBN 0-7715-7399-5).
You can order Canadian books from Canada's Virtual Bookstore at
<http://www.cvbookstore.com>.
For Irish English, see Padiac O'Farrell's "How the Irish speak
English (Mercier, 1993, ISBN 1-85635-055-X); Patrick W. Joyce's
"English as We Speak it in Ireland" (Wolfhound, 2nd ed., 1987, ISBN
0-86327-122-7); or Niklas Miller's "Irish-English, English-Irish
Dictionary" (Abson, 1982, ISBN 0-902920-11-1); or search for titles
containing the word "dictionary" at the Read Ireland Bookstore at
<http://www.readireland.ie>.
A "Scots Leid Haunbuik an FAQ" is available at
<ftp://jpd.ch.man.ac.uk/pub/Scots/ScotsFAQ.txt>. The FAQ for the
newsgroup soc.culture.scottish has many useful pointers.
For English in India, see Ivor Lewis's "Sahibs, Nabobs and
Boxwallahs: A Dictionary of the Words of Anglo-Indian" (OUP, 1991,
ISBN 0-19-562582-X).
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