While. Apparently has an appeal similar to that of amongst and amidst. But yo, I have found a new tool, or should I say toy. Since starting Not One-Off Britishisms, I have relied on Google Ngram, which shows the relative popularity, over time, of a word or phrase in a variety of databases (British English, American English, English, etc.). It’s great, but has the drawback of being limited to published books, which, having gone through a formidable editorial process, are not the earliest adopters of new words and phrases and linguistic trends. I’ve just discovered Google Trends, which shows two trends: the popularity of a word in web searches and, more useful for my purposes, its use in Google News sites. Google News, which can be localized to the U.S. or any other country, includes not only newspapers and magazines, but many web sites. Hence its ear is closer to the ground than Ngram–more “demotic,” as my English Department colleagues would say.
The results for whilst are instructive. Ngram shows a steady decline in American English from about 1810 till 1990 (my provisional date for the beginning of the not one-off-Britishisms trend!) and from then till now a flat line. But Google Trends shows a steady increase starting at the beginning of 2008.
[S]ince many of us do our talking whilst driving, might they consider coming up with a mobile phone that only works in the house, while we’re not spewing emissions along with our hot air? [Matt Richtel, New York Times “Bits” blog, August 22, 2007)/Whilst scouring my mental vault of classroom distractions this past week, I recalled a favorite past time of my youth. Before Facebook and Minecraft, when Netscape Navigator was the browser of choice among proto-hipsters, Cartoon-Network.com ruled my leisure. (Daily Princeonian, blog. April 4, 2011)
notoneoffbritishisms.com 
Ben — It seems clear to me that many writers who use “whilst” in the modern era are doing so consciously as a style flourish, indeed generally to be amusing (although undoubtedly there are many among them who are simply pompous and don’t know it — i.e., they’re NOT aiming to be amusing). So to me, the word is basically fine. And yes, NGRAM is a gem.
Clearly, George, we need an Ngram that can detect irony.
The links in the second paragraph both show Ngram results
Thanks–I will fix.
In 1989, I began buying imported Doctor Who Magazine back issues from a local bookstore (ca. 1985-1992). Many issues contained the word “whilst.” Meanwhile, I didn’t notice it ever being used in British TV shows, not even Blackadder. I came to the conclusion that it was a wonkish hypercorrection, or as George Simonson says, an amusing style choice. For an American to use “whilst,” I would perceive it only as a deliberate affectation.
I’m not sure I agree on the wonkish hypercorrection issue. My undergraduate students, who are definitely not affected, almost always use “amongst” and “amidst” instead of the st-less American versions, and let out with a whilst now and then.
In England, as far as I can see, “while/whilst” and “among/amongst” are used indifferently. I use one or the other without any conscious choice, and can’t detect any rule. “Amid”, however, sounds a little poetic for ordinary speech, and its use would be a matter of deliberate choice, whereas “amidst” attracts no attention.
It’s a word Madonna and Britney would’ve used back when they were affecting English accents.
Plenty of younger Americans are actually using “whilst” because they think it is more correct or formal. So, it is hypercorrection. Maybe not amongst your grad students, for whom it’s a “posh” affectation. I am 99% certain this particular NOOB is spreading among teens and young adults in the US almost entirely because of Wikipedia. Innumerable British editors of that site also feel it is somehow more formal, and use it incessantly, even when writing about decidedly prosaic topics like football (soccer) and punk bands. Because of the WP’s “varieties of English” guideline (WP:ENGVAR for short), most other editors are afraid to change it to “while”. I’m not among them. (Note that was not “amongst”.) The -st is simply a redundant archaism, and can be safely dropped in any register in any dialect of the English.
For what it’s worth, Google gives 133,000 hits for “whilst” on wikipedia.org, and 8.7 million for “while”. That’s a ratio of 65:1
@dw: That demonstrates that plenty of British people also know the -st is simply a colloquial archaism that has survived in a few UK regional dialects and died out in the rest of them, including throughout most of the Commonwealth.
Whilst, amongst, amidst, and while we’re at it, towardS, backwardS, etc. Get RID of these lisps.
…language. (Cor blimey, I s’pose I ought to sort of proofread before queuing up me comments, guv. I actually used to talk like that – I learned to read and write in Oxfordshire before moving to New Mexico.)
In London, when a bus pauses en route as a driver ends his/her shift and we wait for a replacement, the dot matrix display and recorded announcement is ‘Bus will wait here whilst drivers are changed’. It has joined ‘Mind the Gap’ as a distinctive phrase. (And is that a peculiarly British use of ‘mind’??)
That’s not a peculiarly British sense of “mind”, but (like “peculiar”) is definitely far more common in BrEng than NAmEng. Americans and Canadians retain it in stock phrases like “mind your manners”, “mind your own business” and “mind your Ps and Qs”. The prescriptive nature of these suggests a biblical origin (see below). They’ll understand when someone is referred to as another’s “minder”. Plus there’s also the derived “mindful of” which is well-understood.
The King James Bible (KJV) is the favorite version among American Protestants, who are the dominant religious group in the US by a wide margin; same in England, though Prebyterians in Scotland and abroad largely prefer the NIV or NSRV. The KJV, which has had more influence on Modern English than any other single work, contains this “mind” sense of ‘pay attention to, care about, concern oneself with’ in several places: “For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit.” “Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate.” “Nevertheless, whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing.” “For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ: Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.” This work is probably also responsible for the survival of some curious phrases using “mind” in other ways, such as “to be of one mind”, “high-minded”, and “in one’s right mind”.
It also contains “whilst” in 10 places, but “while” in 225 (and the majority of them are cases that could have been swapped with “whilst”). “While” even dominates in the parts where the wording kind of wallows in archaism, e.g. “She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.” (This sort of -eth and thine and hast stuff was already stuffy and leaning toward obsolescence when the KJV was published in 1611, as it is not found in most passages, but tends to be trotted out for effect, as a form of emphasis.)
This seems to suggest that “whilst” was on its way out by the early 17th century, but somehow received a shot in the arm in BrEng sometime later.
Some thematically related stats are that the KJV uses “among” 872 times and “amongst” only twice. Neither “amid” nor “amidst” appear at all (which is rather surprising). “Inward” appears 58 times, “inwards” 20; “outward” 16 times, “outwards” 0; “toward” 318 times, “towards” 0; “backward” 13 times, “backwards” 0. So, something seems to have reinvigorated the excrescently lispy versions later, and whatever it was, it also affected NAmEng for some of these words (the -s ones but not the -st ones).
The -st is only truly excrescent in some words. It has been lost at the end of “along” and “whom”, with “alongst” and “whomst” now being entirely obsolete (apparently already by the time of the KJV, in which neither appears). The suffix is retained in “against” and “midst” because these have diverged in meaning from “again” and “mid” (which mostly just survives as “midst”, “middle”, and the prefix “mid[-]” as in “mid-sentence”, “midriff”). The suffix remains common but not required in “unbeknown[st]” and “beknown[st]”, though both terms themselves (especially “beknown[st]”) are on their way out.
The -st is actually a combination of two suffixes, a genitive -s, and the -t variant of -ed, as found in “slept”, “dreamt”, and BrEng “spelt” (‘spelled’, not ‘type of wheat’ or ‘spliter, slat’ senses). The excrescent -t has (barely) survived in some rural American dialect variants of “once” and “twice” as “oncet” and “twicet”, also spelled “onced” and “twiced”. The genitive nature of the -s is clear from expressions like “a backwards movement”, i.e. ‘a movement that is backward’; this got backformed through truncation into “backwards” taking the place of “backward” even in constructions without a potentially genitive relationship, e.g. “That’s just backwards.”
I seem to see and hear ‘whilst’ used increasingly frequently, in informal speech and writing as well as in journalism and ads and on websites. While the BBC news site mostly uses ‘while’, a few ‘whilst’s have crept into headlines, which are unlikely to be composed by journalists. Not so long ago I seldom heard ‘whilst’ and only occasionally saw it. Its increasing use seems to me to be the adoption as standard of a previously non-standard form rather than widespread hypercorrection.
Equally common on both sides of the pond, what is it about ‘unbeknownst’, which means very little or no more than ‘unknown’? How do these archaisms survive? They should all have disappeared into the mist long ago (except of course for ‘against’).