No comments

Why English spelling is so damn hard — Part 3

  By ,

Please read Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t already done so.

In this third and final part, I’m going to discuss the specific difficulties faced by learners (and native speakers!) of English when it comes to spelling.

In English, the same sound can be spelt in different ways. For instance, the long -ee sound (iː) can be spelt ee (see), ea (tea), ey (key), ei (ceiling), ie (chief), y (happy), plain e (legal), and even eo in the very common word people. That’s eight possibilities, and there are probably others I’ve missed. There’s almost no logic you can apply here – there’s no rule like “this is a verb, so it must be ie” – so you have to learn the spelling of each word separately. It must be said that English isn’t the only major language with this problem. French also suffers from this, and I’ve heard that Norwegian has numerous ways of spelling the “sh” sound as in ship.

English also suffers from the opposite problem, in that the same letter, or combination of letters, can represent different sounds. This is where English differs from French. If you say a French word that I’ve never heard of, I might not know how to spell it, but if I read a new French word, I’ll very likely know how to say it. English fails, miserably, in both directions. To show you what I mean, take the word dreat. It’s a highly obscure technical term, so you probably don’t know it. How do you think it’s pronounced? To see the problem, here’s someone staying at a hotel, talking about how he plans to start the day:

A full English breakfast with a cup of Earl Grey tea? Great idea.

 

The ea combination appears five times in the sentence above, and if you listen carefully to the recording, you’ll notice that it’s pronounced a different way every time. (The ea in the word “Earl” is also affected by the following R.)

So how do you say dreat? You might expect it to rhyme with heat. But perhaps it rhymes with great. Or maybe sweat. Or who knows, something else? Here I’ve recorded some possibilities for the pronunciation of this word, and at the end of this post you’ll find out the answer.

 

Another source of difficulty are double consonants. In fact they’re a real pain. Sometimes double consonants serve a purpose – they can indicate that the preceding vowel is short (as in little), while a single consonant usually follows a long vowel (as in title). Other times, they are created by prefixes and suffixes that modify an existing word, such as in the adverb occasionally, which is formed by adding -ly to the adjective occasional. Occasionally, as with the double N in the word openness, the double letter is actually pronounced as a long consonant. It’s almost like we say the N twice. Much of the time, however, double consonants serve little purpose, as is the case with the double R in embarrass or either of the pairs of double letters in accommodate. Native speakers make mistakes with single and double consonants all the time, so don’t be too concerned if you also have difficulty with them. At the beginning of Part 1, I said that my best performer (so far) in my spelling tests is an Italian guy, and the fact that double consonants are very common in the Italian language might have been to his advantage. (In Romanian, double consonants are pretty rare.)

I wouldn’t want to go here. It would make me thirsty.

…and the sign looks so professional.

You saw the word “millennium” everywhere in the UK around the year 2000. Loads of people got it wrong.

Then we have the schwa. What’s a schwa, you ask? It’s a short, neutral vowel sound, which corresponds to the a in alone. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, the schwa is represented by ə (an upside-down e). For all you Romanians out there, it’s close to the sound you write as ă, the main difference being that it’s sometimes stressed in Romanian but is always unstressed in English. The schwa seems so harmless, but it’s just as big a source of spelling errors among native speakers as double consonants, and here’s why. The words normal, golden, pencil, bacon and album all have the schwa sound in the second syllable, but in each case the sound is represented by a different vowel letter. You could even include y by adding zephyr (which is a word for a gentle breeze) to the list, giving us six possible representations for the schwa sound.

 

There are other possibilities too, mainly vowel combinations like the ai in mountain. This is just like the situation with the long -ee sound I talked about at the start of this post, but as the schwa is the most common sound in English (yes, really), I thought it deserved its own mention.

Last but not least, there are silent letters. As the name suggests, these are letters that make no sound at all, like the B in debt and doubt that I mentioned in Part 1, or the W in wrong and answer. Occasionally, like in debt and doubt, these letters were falsely added for etymological reasons, but mostly the letters were pronounced at one time, but aren’t anymore, and (perhaps unfortunately) the spelling hasn’t been updated to reflect that.

This series of blog posts might not have helped you much with English spelling, but I hope they’ve given you a greater appreciation (that’s with double P) of why it’s such a minefield, and make you feel less bad about it if it’s something you struggle with. Oh, and by the way, dreat is word I just made up.

No comments

Why English spelling is so damn hard — Part 2

  By

If you haven’t yet read Part 1, please do so.

The English long vowel sounds went through some major changes. This happened gradually, over a period of about 400 years starting in the 14th century. The word time was once pronounced just like team is today, while what is now team used to be pronounced similarly to today’s tame. This process is known as the Great Vowel Shift. While the sounds shifted, the spellings of words generally didn’t, and that’s why the pronunciation of English vowels can confuse learners, even in words that are spelt in a consistent way. It also explains why, when I try and spell words to non-native speakers, they are often confused by the letters A, E and I. To complicate matters further, some words escaped the vowel shift, or only shifted partially, and that’s why road and broad don’t rhyme, and neither do bear and hear.

English spelling wasn’t standardised until the 18th century, which is relatively recent. If I’d given my students those spelling tests (see Part 1) 300 years ago, they all would have got 100%; the idea of “right” and “wrong” spelling didn’t exist then. William Shakespeare famously wrote his name in about a dozen different ways, which included just about anything you could think of except, apparently, Shakespeare itself! When spellings were eventually set in stone, they weren’t done so in any logical way. Now we might decide to put cheese in the freezer, but we could just as easily be putting cheeze in the freeser. That cheese got an S while freeze got a Z was essentially random.

There have been attempts to modify and simplify English spelling (there were several in the early 20th century) but with one notable exception, none of them have worked. English spelling has remained an untamed mess. There are reasons for this. What sort of changes would you bring in? A small one (removing silent k, say) or a transition to an entirely phonetic language, wër yoo end up wiθ sumθing laik ðis? How would people agree, on both sides of the Atlantic and everywhere else in the world where English is spoken? If New Spelling became a reality, how would you search documents or web pages that might be written in Old or New Spelling? What would happen to QWERTY keyboards? How would you deal with words that have multiple pronunciations, like vase, which I pronounce /vɑːz/ but others pronounce /veɪs/ or /veɪz/? Here you can hear all three common pronunciations of vase. All of these factors make any systematic spelling changes almost impossible to achieve. Other languages have undergone spelling reform, as Romanian did on a fairly minor scale in the early 1990s, but none of them faced the challenges that English would. The one reform that did succeed, by the way, was lexicographer Noah Webster’s changes in American English: colour became color, centre became center, and so on. But in other parts of the English-speaking world, the old spellings stayed the same.

That’s it for Part 2, but be sure to check out Part 3, where I talk about some of the specific features of English spelling that make it so confusing.

No comments

Why English spelling is so damn hard — Part 1

  By

Warning: This post is directed at upper-intermediate and advanced learners of English.

In the past few months, I’ve given my intermediate-level students (and above) a multiple-choice spelling test. My best students have also attempted a second – harder – test, showcasing some common words that are often misspelled, even by native speakers. My students’ scores have varied quite a bit, with the average being somewhere in the 60–70% range for the first test, and 40–50% for the second. As I keep telling people, these are not terrible scores. Native speakers often struggle their whole lives with spelling, and I’m going to spend this series of three posts explaining why. (The best performer on both tests so far is a young Italian man. As you’ll see in Part 3, that might not be a coincidence.)

So just why is English spelling such a nightmare?

English is a real mish-mash. In the last 1500 years, it has acted like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up words from anywhere and everywhere. It started out as a Germanic language, which already had its fair share of Latinate words. When the Vikings arrived they added their own twist, then the Norman Conquest brought many thousands of French words into the mix. Later, English became swamped by Latin and Greek words as educated people began to travel more (and learn Latin and Greek!). Most recently, English has adopted words directly from languages as diverse as French (faux pas), Japanese (kimono) and Sanskrit (karma).

Why is this a problem? Well, for a start, it increases the number of words in the English language that you have to learn and could potentially spell wrongly, but more importantly, every time you borrow from a new source, you borrow whatever spelling rules that language happens to have. And they might be completely different from anything your own language had previously. Take the word pizza, for example. I recently read that this word has only existed in English since 1935. It’s incredible, really, to think that when my grandparents were growing up, English had no word for what is now an extremely popular food item. When the word did enter the lexicon, they were suddenly confronted with a double Z that stood for a “ts” sound. That might sound fine, but English already had a number of double-Z words, like fizz, puzzle and blizzard, where the double Z represented a simple “z” sound. So this one new word added an extra complication to English spelling all by itself. (The English language could have got round this problem by spelling pizza phonetically, but unlike other languages it has a strong tendency not to do this, and anyway, what spelling would it have adopted? Peetsa? Peetsuh?)

As English borrowed more and more words from its various source languages, it took its sounds from those languages at the same time. Standard British English, which I speak and teach, has 44 sounds (24 consonants, 12 vowels, and 8 diphthongs, which are basically two vowel sounds pronounced as one). That’s a lot. But English never let go of the Latin alphabet, which only has 26 letters! To enable an undersized 26-letter alphabet to spell every word in a language with 44 sounds, you have to allow either (a) some letters to stand for more than one possible sound, throwing all hope of a phonetic alphabet out the window, or (b) employ digraphs or trigraphs: two or three letters that are used together to make a single sound. Unfortunately, English has done both, and in a very unsystematic way. Of course, English could have done what many other languages have done, and use diacritics like é or ç, or other weird letters from outside the standard Latin set, but by the time anybody might have thought to do this, English spelling was already such a mess that adding a few lines and squiggles wouldn’t have achieved all that much.

When English was swamped by all these new Latin and Greek words, some crazy people successfully changed the spellings of existing English words to make them look more Latin or Greek, even when the changes were unjustified. The word island used to be spelt without an S, but the S was added to make it look more like the Latin word insula, even though the word doesn’t have Latin roots. The same thing happened with debt and doubt, which were once (sensibly) spelt without a B. The influx of Greek words brought the ph combination (for the “f” sound) into play, and these same mad people started putting ph into words that weren’t Greek-derived at all (like nephew) just because they thought it looked more impressive. While having nothing to do with Latin or Greek, another example of a spelling becoming more complicated for unjustified reasons is the word hiccup, which is that feeling and noise you get in your throat that you can’t stop, and is often caused by fizzy drink or spicy food. Some people thought it would be a clever idea to include “cough” in the spelling of this word, so hiccough was born, even though the pronunciation remained the same. Thankfully sanity seems to have prevailed with this word, and most people now spell hiccup in the original way.

That’s more than enough for Part 1, but please check out Part 2 for more background into the weird and wacky world of English spelling.

No comments

US vs. UK — Collective Nouns

  By

I saw this headline yesterday on the American website FiveThirtyEight, for an article discussing England’s progress in the World Cup. Yes, while giants like Brazil, Spain and Germany have fallen by the wayside, England are somehow still there, at least for the next few hours.

Because I’m a speaker of British English, not American English, the headline seemed a bit strange. That’s because for me and most British-based writers, England expresses the concept of lots of people: the eleven people on the pitch at any one time, the other twelve members of the squad, the manager, and all the support staff. England for me is most definitely plural in this situation. If I was writing the headline, it would read: “England can get even better. And they will need to.” They, not it. In American English, England is seen as a single entity, which is why it is used. Notice as well that in the opening paragraph of this post I wrote “…England are somehow still there…” without even thinking about it, but an American would most likely write “…England is somehow still there…”.

This US–UK difference is seen for a whole class of words known as collective nouns. These include words such as class, family, team, pack, gang, police, council, committee, and so on. They’re all used to express a group of people, animals, or things. In British English, we usually treat these nouns as plural, and use them only with plural pronouns and verb forms. Americans are much more likely to use the singular versions. (Police, however, is normally treated as plural even in American English.)

UK: My team are losing again. They’re doing very badly at the moment.
US: My team is losing again. It’s doing very badly at the moment.

UK: The local council are facing serious financial difficulties.
US: The local council is facing serious financial difficulties.

UK: My family are staying with me over Easter.
US: My family is staying with me over Easter.

UK: The committee usually make the final decision on these matters.
US: The committee usually makes the final decision on these matters.

For sports teams, local or national, we see the same pattern:

UK: Birmingham City are leading Aston Villa 2–0.
US: Seattle is leading Philadelphia 21–18.

However, some American sports teams have plural names, for example the Red Sox or the Yankees, and they always take plural forms:

US: The Yankees are losing 4–2 to the Red Sox in the top of the seventh inning.

One final note: animals have their own special collective nouns, and there are loads of them. A few examples are a herd of cows, a flock of sheep, a pride of lions, and a shoal of fish. Don’t worry if you don’t know these!

No comments

Fine

  By ,

Fine might be one of the first English words you ever learnt. If someone asks “How are you?”, there are lots of ways to answer, but one of the standard responses is “Fine, thanks.” In many situations, fine means something very similar to “OK”.

Jake: What do you think of that report I sent out?
Jeremy: It’s absolutely fine.

In the dialogue above, Jeremy has no problems at all with Jake’s report.

But fine doesn’t always mean just OK. In certain situations it describes something much better than that. However much you like McDonalds, you’d never call it “fine dining”. That expression is reserved for the experience of eating at fancy restaurants, where you’ll quite possibly also have some fine wine to go with your meal.

If you watch or listen to a weather forecast, and hear the word fine, that’s good news. Fine weather is bright and sunny. Not many clouds, and certainly no rain.

As I discussed last time, fine can also describe something made up of small pieces. It’s the opposite of coarse. We can use fine for anything that involves delicate work or attention to small details: “That painting must have taken ages. Look at all that fine brushwork!”

Finally (or should that be fine-ally?), fine can be a noun, with a completely different meaning from any of the above examples, in which fine was an adjective. A fine is a financial penalty for doing something wrong:

He received a $500 fine and a six-month driving ban.
Library fines are 50p per day, per item.

Like many English nouns, fine can also be a verb, meaning “to receive a fine”:

I got fined because my son wasn’t wearing a seat belt.
The police stopped me but luckily they didn’t fine me.

No comments

Coarse (with an “a”)

  By

The word coarse (with an “a”) is pronounced exactly the same as course (with a “u”), but isn’t as common.

We use the word coarse to describe something made up of large pieces. Something made from small pieces is described as being fine.

You might even describe somebody’s hair as being coarse (if the hairs are thick) or fine (if the hairs are thin). I personally have coarse, or thick, hair. I inherited that from my mother’s side of the family.

Coarse can also be used to describe somebody who lacks manners, or swears a lot. “I can’t believe the way your brother behaves at the table. He’s so coarse!”

We occasionally use coarse to describe a sound that is unpleasant and rough. “After smoking thirty a day since he was a teenager, his voice had become rather coarse.” We might also say that such a sound is harsh or grating.

Finally, coarse fishing is a mostly British term that means fishing in freshwater (not sea water) for fish that you won’t eat, should you be lucky enough to catch any. You just put the fish back in the water.

Next up: fine.

No comments

Course (without “of”)

  By

In my last post I talked about the not-so-simple expression of course. This post is about the word course on its own, without the “of”. It has several meanings.

If you’re learning English, it’s likely you’ll be doing a course: a number of classes, or a programme of study or training. If you’re extremely lucky (!), you might even be doing a course with me. Notice that we usually do a course. Some people talk about taking a course, especially in American English. You can’t make a course however; this is incorrect. (I could make a course, but that’s because I’m a teacher. I might physically create a course for my students. Have a look at my very first post, which covered do and make.)

I’ve just started my upper-intermediate English course. It’s quite hard!
Torben is on the same course as me.
My son wants to do a guitar course.
I’m doing a course in advanced economics. (It’s common to say you’re doing a course in something.)
Why don’t you take a Spanish course? It’d help you a lot. (The verb take here is common in American English.)

Incorrect: *I’m making a three-year university course so I can become an accountant.

We can also talk about a course of medical treatment:

A course of chemotherapy usually takes between three and six months.
When taking antibiotics, it is vital that you complete the course, to prevent reinfection.

Course can also mean the direction that a vehicle moves in (especially a boat, an aircraft or a spaceship), or the path that a river takes:

The adverse weather conditions over the Baltic Sea caused the pilot to abruptly change course.
From the village of Baziaș, the border between Romania and Serbia follows the course of the Danube.

Sometimes we talk about changing course figuratively, when no actual planes or boats or rivers are involved:

The discussion completely changed course after Caroline showed us the latest sales figures.

We can also talk about something (or someone) being on course, which means “likely to succeed”. If you’re on course, things are going according to plan:

We are on course to meet our sales targets for the year ending June 2018.

Something can just as easily be off course, which means “no longer going the right way”:

The boat was blown off course by strong winds caused by Cyclone Pam.

Note that off course is pronounced quite differently from the far more common expression of course.

Here is me saying “Of course. Of course you can come.”


And here I’m saying “Off course. The boat was blown off course.”


The word course is often used for the area on which certain sports take place:

There are approximately 2500 golf courses in the UK, accounting for more than 0.5 per cent of its land area.
The London Marathon course includes some of the capital’s best-known tourist sights.
Ascot is a very famous racecourse. (A racecourse – all one word – is where people race horses.)

A course can also mean part of a meal. The courses are served separately:

A three-course lunch at The Oaks costs £16.

One final meaning of course is a layer of bricks or other building materials:

After a long delay, it was exciting to see the first course of bricks finally being laid.

Before I go, note that the word coarse also exists in English. It is pronounced exactly the same as course, which means that the two words are homophones. I was going to talk about coarse in this post, but just like course, the word has several meanings, so I think it deserves its own post. Don’t go away!

No comments

Of course

  By

Of course is an extremely useful phrase in English. However, a lot of non-native speakers use it too much, and in ways that can seem impolite. In this post I’ll talk about when you should, and probably shouldn’t, be using of course.

Of course is a stronger way of saying “yes”. It means certainly, absolutely, 100 per cent. It also means that what you’re saying is obviously true. We mostly use it when responding to a question, but we do sometimes use it in other situations.

Here are some polite, and perfectly normal, situations when you might want to use of course.

Example 1:

Steve: Can I borrow your pen?
Sandra: Of course.

Sandra is telling Steve that he can absolutely borrow her pen. It’s no problem at all to Sandra if Steve uses her pen. This is a very common, and polite, way of using of course.

Example 2:

Dave: Could you help me move this box? It’s really heavy.
Diana: Of course.

It’s no problem at all for Diana to help Dave move the box. She’s happy to help.

Example 3:

Gabrielle: It’s quite hot in here, isn’t it? Do you mind if I open the window?
Gary: Of course not.

When Gabrielle asks Gary “Do you mind…?”, she means “Is it a problem for you?” or “Would it annoy you?”
Gary’s reply – “Of course not” – shows that it isn’t a problem for him at all. He’s perfectly happy for Gabrielle to open the window.

Example 4:

Cameron: We’re going to see Red Sparrow at the cinema tonight. It starts at eight. Would you like to come?
Caroline: Of course!

Caroline is saying that she’d really like to go. She’s happy that Cameron has invited her.

Example 5:

Fiona: Do you think I can pass the exam?
Fred: Of course you can!

It seems that Fiona is low on confidence; she thinks she might not pass the exam. Fred is giving her some encouragement, saying that she is definitely capable of passing it.

Example 6:

Yvonne: My grandmother said she would never move out of that house, but she did, of course.
Yvette: Yes. She decided it was too big for her.

Yvonne is using of course here because Yvette knows that her grandmother moved out of her house. It’s a fact that should be obvious to Yvette. If Yvette was a complete stranger who knew nothing about Yvonne’s grandmother, using of course would be a bit strange.

Example 7:

She was wearing blue, yellow and red, which are of course the colours of the Romanian flag.

If you use of course here, you expect that the person you’re talking to knows what colours are on the Romanian flag.

Now here are some situations where you don’t really want to be using of course, because you could be seen as impolite or arrogant, or you might make the other person feel stupid. Do you want to do that? Of course not.

Example 8 (rude!):

Diana: That box looks really heavy. Would you like some help with it?
Dave: Of course.

When Dave says of course here, what he means is: “Yes, I obviously need help. Can’t you see? Why are you even asking me?!”
This is obviously a bit rude. Note that it’s polite to use of course when responding to someone’s request for help, as in Example 2 above, but it’s not polite when responding to someone’s offer of help. When responding to offers, it’s best to simply say “Yes” or “Yes please”.

Example 9 (rude!):

Brian: Would you like a cup of tea?
Ben: Yes please.
Brian: Do you take milk?
Ben: Yes.
Brian: And sugar?
Ben: Of course not.

When Ben says of course not, he means “What makes you think I want sugar?” Again, it’s not very polite.

Example 10 (rude!):

Tomás: Where in the UK do you come from?
Tony: I grew up in a town called Evesham. It’s in the west of England, not far from Birmingham.
Tomás: Nice. How long have you lived in Spain?
Tony: Three years.
Tomás: And can you speak Spanish?`
Tony: Of course.

Tony’s of course means “Obviously I can speak Spanish! I’ve been here three years. Who do you think I am?!” Tony’s reply seems arrogant, and Tomás possibly feels a bit offended now, because he thinks he asked a reasonable question. There’s no guarantee that someone who has lived in Spain for three years can speak Spanish at a good level. (In fact, there are plenty of British people who moved to Spain thirty years ago or more, and still can’t speak the language. We’re terrible at learning languages.)

Don’t stop using of course. Most of the time it’ll sound polite and friendly when you say it. You just have to be careful! For more when to use of course and when to avoid it, have a look at this lovely video from Vicki of Simple English Videos.

No comments

I’m back

  By , ,

One of my students recently mentioned that I hadn’t posted on this blog since last August. I’d stopped due to a combination of an increased workload and a feeling that nobody ever read it, but he’s now given me the motivation to start up again.

This evening I went to Pizzeria Poli and got myself a Capricioasa pizza, topped with ham, mushrooms and olives. It was cut into six slices, which was just as well, because I never could have eaten eight. That last sentence was a joke, by the way – obviously you get the same amount of pizza no matter how it’s sliced. It’s also an example of a Yogi-ism, something that the famous baseball player Yogi Berra supposedly said.

Here are some other famous Yogi Berra quotes:

  • It ain’t over till it’s over.
  • The future ain’t what it used to be. (I should do a post on the word “ain’t” some time.)
  • Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t go to yours.
  • Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.
  • When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
  • You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.
  • Nobody goes there nowadays; it’s too crowded.

Berra died in 2015 at the age of 90, but his quotes, of which you can find many more online, live on.

While I was waiting for my pizza, a song called Him & I, by G-Eazy and Halsey (whoever they are) was playing on the radio. I no longer have the faintest clue about modern mainstream music. The title of the track, “Him and I”, really stood out for me, because it’s grammatically incorrect. Song lyrics often deviate from what you find in a grammar book, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Unusual use of language can often make a song sound better, in fact. But what’s strange about Him & I is that the error is in the title, and repeated 22 times throughout the song, if the lyrics I’m looking at now are to be believed.

What’s wrong with “him and I”? Well, him is an object pronoun and I is a subject pronoun. When you have two pronouns together, joined by “and”, they must both be either subject or object pronouns. You can’t mix them. You must say either “him and me” (both object pronouns) or “he and I” (both subject pronouns). Here are some examples of correct sentences:

  • There is a big age gap between him and me.
  • It was getting late, and everybody had gone home except him and me.
  • He and I don’t really get along.
  • He and I each had three slices of pizza.

I sat down on a bench in the Botanic Park to eat my pizza. With spring finally in the air after a late winter, it’s lovely there. On the bench, someone with a good command of English had penned some amusing graffiti:

There are several puns here. A pun is a play on words.
On the left we’ve got some much-needed encourage-mint, then we’ve got a rather funny Single Bells version of the famous Jingle Bells Christmas carol. Next there appears to be some kind of meme, where telling someone to step on Lego is a way of wishing pain on a person, because as we all know, stepping on Lego is very painful indeed. (Note that in the British English that I grew up speaking, Lego was uncountable. I never would have said “a Lego”.) Then we have a shivering, and relatively small, chili pepper. He or she is a little chili! (That’s a pun on a little chilly, meaning “a bit cold”.) Finally we have a seal, saying “I approve”. Presumably this seal is giving his or her, um, seal of approval.

That’s all for me for now, but stay tuned!

One Comment

Getting from A to B (and perhaps even C) — Part 5

  By

You’ll be relieved to know that this is my fifth and final post in the series on transport.

What word to we use to describe the process of getting from once place to another? Journey? Travel? Tour? Trip? We have several words in English that we use to talk about getting from A to B, but they’re all used slightly differently. Understandably this can be confusing for learners, so I’ll try to clear things up a bit here.

Trip is probably the easiest. If you started at A and arrived at B, you’ve completed a trip, whether it took you five minutes or five weeks. We can even use trip to talk about the whole experience of going from A to B, spending time at B, and coming back to A again.

Devonport is only a short ferry trip away from central Auckland.
I’m just going to make a trip to the supermarket. Is there anything you need?
A round trip costs £15. (“Round trip” means from A to B and back to A.)
Last month I went on a business trip to Hong Kong.
Have a good trip.

Journey is similar to trip, but we tend to use it for longer experiences. Unlike trip, we only use journey to describe the process of getting to the destination, not what happens when we get there.

The journey from Timișoara to Baia Mare took almost seven hours.
I saw my cousin on my return journey from Scotland.
If you exit the Underground at one station and enter at a different station, you will be charged for two separate journeys.
Have a safe journey.

Travel can be either a verb (“I travelled by car”) or an uncountable noun (“bus travel”). The following sentences are all correct:

I don’t like travelling by boat because I often get sick.
Train travel in France is expensive.
Motorists are urged to avoid all unnecessary travel.
If you travel after nine o’clock, you usually get a cheaper fare.

Because travel is uncountable, you can’t say “a travel”. A lot of people get this wrong. The following sentences are all incorrect:

*I hope you have a good travel.
*The kids were exhausted after a long travel.
*I’ve done three travels to Germany so far this year.

Tour is a little different. A tour is usually something you do for pleasure, and you’ll normally have a guide, someone who shows you around. In a tour, you usually (but not always) finish up where you started.

Last year we went on a ten-day tour of Australia.
If you go to Boston, I’d certainly recommend the Duck Boat tours.
Tours of the museum are every hour, on the hour, from 10am to 4pm.

Sports teams sometimes go on tours where they play several matches, usually in the same country. Note that tour can also be a verb:

The British and Irish Lions recently toured New Zealand.

A cruise is a holiday spent on a ship, where you visit several places along the way. A voyage is a journey to a very distant place, often on a ship but sometimes on a spaceship. If you’ve ever been on a voyage, please leave a comment!

For shorter trips, we sometimes talk about an excursion or an outing.

My mother doesn’t like being in the nursing home, but she enjoys the weekly excursions.
My eldest son is going on a school outing to the Natural History Museum tomorrow.

An expedition is fairly serious business. You go on an expedition if you’re exploring an area, perhaps for scientific purposes, or if you’re at war.

Several of our common “travel verbs” can also be used as nouns in place of words like “trip” or “journey”. Usually the noun and verb are the same, but for the verb “to fly”, the noun is flight.

It’s a short drive from Jack’s house.
Jakarta to Bali is a 90-minute flight.
I went on a long bike ride yesterday, so I’m quite sore now.
Amelia goes for a two-mile run every morning before breakfast.
We like to go for a brisk walk after our Sunday dinner.
The train ride through the Carpathian Mountains is beautiful.

How do you drive (or ride) this thing?

Finally, a receptionist at a Romanian hotel once asked me, *”How was your road?” In some languages you say the equivalent of this, but in English we don’t. A road is strictly the thing that cars and trucks travel on. We say “How was your journey?” or “How was your trip?” We might also ask “How was your flight?” if we know that the person travelled by plane.