It’s always good to check my inbox and see an email from Nancy Friedman. One came last week and this is what it said:

“This is BrE, right?” she asked. “Have you spotted this trend?”

I answered “yes” to both questions–the first correctly and the second, not correctly at all. I was certainly aware of the term in British English, meaning, as the OED puts it, “Chiefly British slang. Of a state of affairs, etc.: fixed, settled, secure; arranged, prepared, dealt with.” And I had been seen the signs in British train and underground stations (as part of a campaign that started in 2016),

It’s a useful word, and my wife and I had actually adopted it around the house. And I thought–and I told Nancy I had–written about it on the blog. But in fact I hadn’t. The closest I’d come was a post on the similar but less forceful “sort out” way back in 2011. In truth, I wasn’t even aware that “sorted” had arrived on U.S. shores. But it has.

The British use is relatively new, I should say. The OED has a couple of examples of something or someone being “well sorted” from the 1980s, with the first case of the word standing alone being this quote from a 1995 Independent article: “They could be sensible with their life, financially sorted at 25, for example.” “Sorted” is listed as an adjective, and derives, of course, from the verb “sort.” And while I know that British people use the verb to mean deal with or handle or take care of (“Can you sort tonight’s dinner?”), the OED hasn’t caught up with usage: the only examples are cases of “sort out,” as in my 2011 post.

In any case, Google Ngram Viewer shows that up until the 1980s, British and American use of “sorted” was roughly equal, indicating the presence in both countries of the literal, traditional use of the word, as in, “I sorted the laundry by color” and the subsequent rise of the more general, slang, “taken care of” in the U.K.

Ngram viewer has a bit of a lag, and I expect the blue line will start ticking up soon: as Nancy noticed, “sorted” has hit U.S. shores. A few other recent examples:

• “So it behooves the three most consequential and compensated people in this particular build — Giannis, Bam and Spoelstra — to get all of it sorted as soon as possible.”–Sports Illustrated, referring to the Miami Heat basketball team.
• “I always have an iron sent to my room when I unpack, and I try to get that sorted from the beginning so it makes life easier on the trip.”–Gabriella Khalil, from Philadelphia, quoted in the New York Times.
• “Consider layering season sorted.”–US magazine.
• “Having to clean them twice a year is a small price to pay for the peace of mind I get from finally having this essential part of my emergency plan sorted.”–New York Times Wirecutter section, on water containers.

The OED has a couple of additional meanings for “sorted,” both listed as British slang and dating from 1991. The first is, “Esp. of a person: self-assured, emotionally well-balanced; streetwise, ‘cool’.” And the second, “Of a person: supplied with or under the influence of illicit drugs, particularly those associated with the U.K. club subculture.”

No sign of either one in the U.S. as yet.

Since I last addressed it fifteen years ago, I feel that “bin”–what Americans would wordily call “garbage can,” “trash can,” “wastepaper basket,” or (less wordily) “garbage”–has been making progress here. Most recent evidence is this Facebook ad from an American leather company:

Still no sign of “bin” as a verb.

I was excited when a Facebook friend, Don McLeese, posted this photo:

As I well knew, “anti-clockwise” (or “anticlockwise”) is the British equivalent of U.S. “counter-clockwise” (with various hyphenation alternatives). The difference has been apparently in place since both words emerged: “anti-” in 1879 and “counter-” in 1882, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. All of the OED‘s examples of the first are British, and all of the second, American.

Naturally, I asked Don where he saw this. He told me it was at a health facility in Des Moines, Iowa, where he lives. I checked out the facility’s website and there is no mention of any British ownership or affiliation. Unfortunately, it seems to be kind of a one-off: American pickin’s for “anticlockwise” are quite slim. I did dig up a 2021 New York Times article about NASA where the reporter writes, “Still, the resulting numbers did not make sense until they realized they had read the 1s and 0s in the wrong direction, anticlockwise instead of clockwise.” And a commenter on Lynne Murphy’s blogpost on the subject seemed to imply it’s common in scientific circles: “In formal physics/mathematics literature, I seem to never see “counter-clockwise” – when referring for instance to particle spin.” So I’m tagging this one “On the radar.”

For what it’s worth, here’s one more comment on Lynne’s post: “As a practising occultist, I can confirm that deosil and widdershins are in wide use as the normal specialist terms for clockwise and anti-clockwise. Deosil is more common, simply because clockwise movement is itself more common in rituals.”

And another: “The directions are strongly associated with the the Sun’s movement as viewed from the northern hemisphere. (I’ve seen sunwise used once or twice as an equivalent of deosil.) “White” magic associates itself with this natural course of progression, and therefore if you’re turning around or walking in a circle, for instance, you move deosil. Moving widdershins would be very unusual, and would be associated with destructive magic such as cursing.”

Here, finally, is a question. When old-fashioned clocks finally disappear, will people understand what any of these terms even mean? Maybe we should all go with deasil and widdershins.

As of now, two friends have forwarded me the New Yorker‘s recent article about American adoption of British soccer/football terminology–especially treating teams as plural, such as “England have advanced to the semifinals”–with messages along the lines of “In case you missed it!” To which I snarkily replied, “More like in case they’ve missed the fact that I’ve been writing about this for thirteen years!”

As it happens, with the World Cup in full swing, I’ve been thinking about another Britishism that seems to have been adopted by the American announcers on Fox, John Strong and Stu Holden. It involves not grammar or terminology (like calling the the field “the pitch” or a uniform “kit”) but pronunciation, and specifically the way stress is placed in compound terms such as “halftime,” “red card,” “goal kick,” and “set piece.” My sense is that in American English the stress is on the first word or syllable, while in Britain–and for Strong and Holden–it’s on the second. HalfTIME, red CARD, etc.

This topic (as a general phenomenon, not just in soccer) is rather surprisingly complicated. I’ve actually been thinking about it for a month or so, since reading a New York Times column in which John McWhorter observed (referring strictly to the U.S.) that

“names with two parts often start out with the accent on the second one, and over time, as the name becomes culturally well-established, the accent shifts to the first one. In a 1955 episode of the sitcom “Make Room for Daddy,” the characters pronounce “Little League” — founded 16 years earlier — as “little LEAGUE.” It’s more commonly spoken now as LITTLE league. In a 1964 episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” a woman says “crossword PUZZLE” — because that was the way it would have been pronounced when crosswords were popularized in the 1920s, and the actress was born in 1896.”

It rang true, as I thought of 1930s gangster movies with lines like “So you’re a wise GUY, eh?” or “What do you make me for, a boy SCOUT.” Now in the U.S., we say “WISE guy” and “BOY scout.”

However, over in Britain, they (still) say “boy SCOUT.” I learned that in a 2012 article called “Informativeness is a Determinant of Compound Stress in English,” by Melanie J. Bell and Ingo Plag, which gets into some of the complexity of this issue. And the Brits also say “New YEAR,” “ice CREAM,” and “weekEND,” while we stress the first syllable. (Adding to the complexity: I’ve noticed significant variation among Americans in such terms as “red LIGHT”/”RED light” and “short STORY”/”SHORT story.”)

Back to the soccer/football compounds, I can attest to Strong and Holden’s pronunciation, and while my strong sense is that this is the British way, it’s hard to confirm, without listening to dozens of hours of football commentary, which I’m not prepared to do. I did go over to the valuable Youglish site and listened to about twenty-five YouTube clips of U.K. people saying “halftime.” The results were about equally divided, between those who did it the American way, with emphasis on the first syllable, and what I take to to be the British, with stress on the second syllable or equal.

If I get my energy up, I might listen to “red card,” “set piece,” and the like. But in the meantime, why don’t you lot just tell me what you think,

Sometimes a NOOB just slips right by me. That was the case with the word at the top of his post. I had definitely encountered it as an adjective meaning characterized by shouting, but didn’t think of it as notably British, rather one of a group of relatively newfangled y-ending epithets that includes “flirty,” “melty” (as in cheese), and “stinky” (which has largely replaced “smelly”). But Lynne Murphy, in her latest Separated by a Common Language blog post, enlightens me.

As she points out, the word has been around for well over 100 years, but early uses tended to refer to a particular vocal quality, especially while singing. The OED quotes a 1914 book on choral technique: “There are a great majority of untrained voices, which may be roughly classified as follows:—weak and quavery, worn and tinny, harsh and shrill, strident, metallic, shouty, throaty, cavernous, hooty, scoopy, and nondescript.”

As Google Ngram Viewer shows, widespread use took off around the turn of the twenty-first century, first in the U.K.

Lynne looked into the word because a reader sent in an example from an April 2026 article in the New York Times, referring to one of Donald Trump’s capital-letter-and-exclamation-point-laden social media posts as a “shouty missive.” That example, referring (as has become common) to metaphorical shouting in text rather than actual shouting, is just one of thirteen times the newspaper has used the word in the past year. Others include:

• In the TV show The Bear, an interviewer asks a chef “if a restaurant kitchen is as shouty as they depict it on TV,”
• Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, is described as making “shouty floor speeches criticizing members of his own party.”
• A staging of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is described as a “shouty, oddly arrhythmic production.”
• The common caricature of a sports agent is “a shouty, larger-than-life, money-and-power-focused suit.”

And finally this one, which shows that the singing use is still around: the Times review of part II of the film Wicked, mentions “routinely timed musical numbers … oscillate between shouty group set pieces and quieter, intimate interludes.”

Thanks to everybody who entered the competition to win a signed copy of my book Gobsmacked! by suggesting future NOOBs entries. I had said there’d be one winner, but two people sent in words or phrases I intend to write about, so I will mail each of them a book. If one of them is you, send me your address via the contact form on this page, and I will mail/post you your copy.

The first winner is RevStuart79, who suggested “proper fit,” meaning, in current American lingo, “super [sexually] hot.” This was actually brilliant, since, just a day or two before, I had a chat with my daughter Lizy Yagoda, who suggested my looking into Britishisms used on the American version of Love Island, one of those Britishisms being “proper fit,” and another being “chat” especially as a noun. I resolved to do a post on Love Island-isms, and the Rev’s comment furthered my resolve.

The second winner is longtime commenter David Griggs, who had two suggestions. The first was “Brit,” meaning a British person. I hadn’t thought of this as having British origin, but it does; I will look into it further and report on it. David’s other suggestion was the phrase “make do and mend,” which I had never encountered but which he said showed robust U.S. use in Ngram Viewer. I looked into it a little bit, and learned it was a World War II slogan to promote frugality. But it’s had much less global impact than “Keep Calm and Carry On,” and I think most of the U.S. hits comes from mentions of a Connecticut rock band that took the phrase as its. However, it does show up a bit in recent U.S. fashion journalism, so I may cover it. Stay tuned.

Again, thanks for your comments and for reading. I intend to keep calm and carry on.

Unaccountably, this blog has now has had more than 3,500,000 page views, which would seem to prove that the more arcane the topic, the more attention it will attract. Or, at least, that obscurity is not the kiss of death.

I knew this was coming up, and was planning to work up some contest where the first person to comment after 3.5 millions was reached would get a free signed copy of Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English, but I was asleep at the switch. (Is that an expression in British English?) So here’s the new plan: I’ll mail a book to someone who comments on this post today with a suggested Not One-Off Britishism that I haven’t yet written about, and that I decide is the best of the day.

Anyway, thanks to the OED, Ngram Viewer, the New York Times, and Jonathon Green’s Encyclopedia of Slang, which make the blog possible. And to readers and, especially, commenters, who keep me going.

I see that only once in the history of Not One-Off Britishisms have I addressed the expression “to move house,” which is the British equivalent of what Americans mean when they say, “to move.” It was back in 2011, the first year of the blog, and I recounted, in passing, “the thrill of seeing,” in a New Yorker Janet Malcolm piece about Gertrude Stein, published eight years earlier, a sentence that began, ‘She and [Alice B.] Toklas were about to move house from Bilignin to a manor in Culoz, a few miles away…'”

I didn’t mention that the first time I ever encountered the expression also had a New Yorker connection. It was in 1996 or so, and I was interviewing Tina Brown, the magazine’s editor in chief (who is British, as Janet Malcolm is not), and she said something about “moving house.” I had not yet devised the concept of NOOBs, but the expression was so striking and different that I filed it away in the recesses of my consciousness.

The OED‘s first two citations for the phrase were both written by Thomas Hardy, the first in an 1888 short story called “Waiting Supper”: “Side by side as they had lived in his day here were they now. They had moved house in mass.” (Incidentally, the OED defines the word “wait,” as Hardy used it in the story’s title, as “To postpone (a meal) in expectation of the arrival of someone. colloquial.” It has four citations, all English, from 1788 to 1861. From an 1836 Charles Dickens letter: “I hope and trust you did not wait dinner for me.” The only time I’ve ever encountered it, till now, is from my wife, born in Massachusetts, where a lot of Britishisms, like “rubbish,” linger.)

But “move house” had been in circulation for at least three decades before Hardy’s story–probably well over three decades. A Google Books search reveals that in 1857, “Moving House” was the title of both an article in The National Magazine and a chapter in Charles Manby Smith’s book The Little World of London.

Google’s Ngram Viewer shows that “move house” dramatically increased in popularity in Britain between about 1940 and 1980, and started creeping up a bit in the U.S. in the 2000s.

It’s still pretty uncommon here, and the only example I found in an (admittedly) cursory search was from a 2025 New York Times article on how to store your clothes: “If you’re moving house, Elizabeth Giardina, 45, the creative director of the fashion label Another Tomorrow, suggests having an exterminator treat the closets before you unpack.”

But it seems that in the past couple of years, some variations have appeared on these shores. For example, this ad popped up on Facebook the other day:

And note this sub-head on a recent Times article:

Finally, the American writer Hua Hsu was quoted in the Times in 2023 as saying, “I was moving offices a few months ago.”

I believe that traditionally in America, all three of those quotes would be simply “moving”–possibly followed by “to a new warehouse,” “to a new apartment,” or “to a new office.” Or maybe, in the case of the offices and the apartments, “changing.” I welcome the Britishism, in adding specificity or, in the longer form, concision.

But it’s interesting that, as opposed to the singular “move house,” all three of those examples use the plural–“warehouses,” “apartments.” and “office.” And so does this 1991 OED quote from the English magazine Which?: “Personal pension plans may be preferable if you’re going to move jobs frequently or take a career break.” (AmE would say “change jobs.”)

I asked my University of Sussex compadre Lynne Murphy if the plural form is common in the U.K., for words other than “house.” She quickly did some nifty research on the Corpus of Global Web-Based English and answered in the affirmative, but not overwhelmingly. For example, there were 33 instances in the corpus of “moving offices” and 20 of “moving office.”

The latter still sounds awfully odd to me. But we shall see if it makes some inroads in America, and in my consciousness.

Some time ago, I was reading an American friend’s Facebook post. He was remembering when, decades back,

“I was at my folks’ apartment and put on [the album] Blonde on Blonde. My father said, ‘Take off that garbage.’ I stared at him, utterly stonkered.”

For such a productive group of words, “stonkered” and its variants are quite new. The OED‘s first citation is for the verb “stonker,” meaning to kill or destroy a person or thing. The quote is from the Anzac Bulletin in 1917: “Without a gun in their hands the Diggers just went for them and stonkered the lot, except one whom they brought in prisoner.” Anzac refers to the Australian and New Zealand forces in World War I, and for three decades or so, the word was the exclusive province of Down Under, even as it developed new meanings:

• Exhausted: “It’s this rotten pack. By heaven, I’m feeling stonkered! Where the Hell’s Our Camp?” Aussie: Australian Soldiers Magazine, 1918
• Intoxicated: “”There is a difference between a man who is either full, shickered, stonkered … or boozed, and he who is … paralytic drunk.” Perth Daily News, 1922
• Rendered useless or ineffectual; defeated.
• Surprised, gobsmacked: “Why don’t they shut off the confounded thing?” “Too stonkered with surprise, I’ll bet.” A Upfield, Royal Abduction, 1932.

British soliders picked up the verb in World War II and streamlined it. The Daily Telegraph wrote in 1944, “Here was one more message before we left–that British troops on a captured ridge were being ‘stonked.'” (Note inverted commas indicating novelty.) And a reader wrote to The Times in 1993, “To many of my generation who served in the Army in the second world war stonking meant the putting-down of an artillery or mortar concentration on a given target.”

The word caught the fancy of a young RAF officer and Punch contributor names Basil Boothroyd, and he wrote a rather remarkable sketch for the September 6, 1944, number called “Stonking Times.” It begins:

“I should not like to think that the Punch volumes for World War II contained no mention of the stonking types who helped to win it (hoping for a world fit for Stonkers to stonk in) and of they stonking times they had. So I am going to place on record a few facts about Stonkers.”

The word caught on among the British public at large, who, by the late 1980s, were using it as a noun meaning “Something which is very large or impressive as its kind, a ‘whopper.'” A 1994 record review (not of Blonde on Blonde) calls the disk “an absolute stonker.” The next and at this point final development was “stonking” as an adjective, meaning marvelous or great, and adverb, meaning extremely. A 1993 audio review notes, “The Kenwood receiver is … stonking value for anyone wanting to talk their first steps into home cinema.” Some will remember Boris Johnson’s quote from 2019, when he called the Conservative Party’s election victory “a huge, great, stonking mandate.”

By this point, “stonking” is much more commonly used than “stonker” or “stonkered.” As for American use, here’s the Ngram Viewer graph:

As you can see, the word is still pretty rare in these parts. An early American use was from occasionally Anglophilic Spy magazine in 1998: ” Your drug-use pattern was to make do with ‘ludes and bookze for most of the month and then let rip with a stonking crack and scag binge.”

Earlier this year, in a review of a movie called Nuisance Bear, the Hollywood Reporter wrote: “There’s also beautiful footage of foxes, of stonking big crows right out of Poe and caribou with sprawling antlers that are like contemporary art sculptures.”

And NOOBs Hall-of Famer Dwight Garner of the New York Times referred to a “stonking sentence” by Robert Macfarlane. As usual, Garner was right, and let’s go out with Macfarlane’s words, from Underland: A Deep Time Journey:

“This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends — not with a bang but a visitors’ center.”

It won’t surprise you to learn that I keep a file of Britishisms I encounter here in the U.S.A. Some of these make it into blogposts, but others stay in the file, because I don’t find any more of them. At this point, I think it’s time to give up hope of these one-offs catching on, so here’s what I’ve got. I’d of course be interested in any future American sightings.

Prawn (American: “shrimp.”) “A raw prawn is part of the sea; broiled, it becomes part of our art.”–Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker.

Petrol (American: “gasoline.”) From the New York Times Wirecutter section:

Litre {This one is a double Britishism, a, because Americans would normally refer to quarts or gallons, and b, because if they did use the word, they would spell it “liter.”) “… a study by the Washington Post estimates that using ChatGPT to compose a single hundred-word e-mail uses up more than half a litre of water.”–Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

And now, while I’ve got your attention, here are a couple of old-favorite, definitely not one-off Britishisms that keep extending their U.S. reach:

(Americans would traditionally say “ugly parts.” Most recent post on “bits” here.)

(I see I haven’t written on “cheeky“–other than “cheeky Nandos“–since way back in the early days of the blog. I’ve got a good bit on it in my book Gobsmacked!, though, so this might be a good time to pick up a copy. Link to your right.)