American-English and British-English

Many people know that American-English and British-English are not entirely the same. Some words are spelled differently: e.g., labor vs labour, practice (noun or verb) vs. practise (verb). Some verb tenses and grammatical points are also different: e.g., shall and may. The collective plural is used in British-English, but not in American-English. E.g., Congress has raised questions. Or, Parliament have raised questions. 

But the most significant distinction between American-English and British-English is that in the former modifiers are placed near the words they modify, as opposed to any place in the sentence. Likewise, American-English does not favor/favour the passive voice. Consider this sentence:

“At the same time Parliament’s attitude towards frequent instances of disregard of appropriation by the Executive hardened considerably.” Paul Einzig, The Control of the Purse (London, 1959), page 174. 

A naive reader might quite reasonably read this sentence as stating that some unstated entity disregarded appropriations fixed or made by the Executive. Of course, that interpretation would be a misreading of what the author was trying to communicate. 

In American-English, we would add a comma for the introductory clause, we would clarify what entity determined or fixed the appropriation (thereby avoiding the passive voice), and we would move and modify several modifiers and modifying clauses. 

In American-English, this sentence would be written as:

“At the same time, Parliament’s attitude hardened considerably towards the Executive’s frequent instances of disregard of its [that is, Parliament’s] appropriations.”

This change in American-English came about with the publication of Strunk’s The Elements of Style (1920), and republished as Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (1959). All this illustrates that: ‘England and America are two countries divided by a common language’—sometimes attributed to Shaw, Wilde, and Churchill.

Seth Barrett Tillman, ‘American-English and British-English,’ New Reform Club (Sept. 10, 2026, 6:39 AM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2026/09/american-english-and-british-english.html>;