I belong to a fantastic international writing group. There, last week, I presented a paragraph that included "tons of something" (I can't actually remember what the noun was). A New Zealander in the group commented, "I suppose we'd say heaps of."
Indeed. Here are some imprecise, informal ways of expressing 'large quantities of' in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. The darker the blue, the more characteristic that phrase is to that country:
Or, here's a better, but not as pretty way to report these results, as number of occurrences per million words. This makes the numbers comparable across countries (since the individual country corpora are not all the same size). Here are those figures for the three main expressions, with the numbers rounded.
| expression |
US |
CA |
GB |
IE |
AU |
NZ |
| tons of |
19 |
17 |
8 |
7 |
7 |
7 |
| loads of |
5 |
5 |
22 |
22 |
9 |
10 |
| heaps of |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
10 |
11
|
| | | | | |
|
This is saying, for instance, that the American corpus has
tons of at a rate of 19 times per million words of running text. (For comparison, the phrase
a lot of is around 300 times per million in each country's corpus.)
So, we can see that tons of is preferred in North America, loads of in the UK and Ireland, and Australia and New Zealand like heaps of but use loads of at nearly the same rate as heaps of.
Bunches of had less than 1 per million in all of the country corpora. It seems to be more often literal in all countries—lots of bunches of grapes, flowers, or asparagus, and a few bunches of people, websites, and, in one NZ example: "small bunches of noisy wowsers trying to tell everybody else how to live their lives."
I've only shown you the first six countries in the corpus results. After that, we get into Asian and African countries where English is spoken. Tons of dominates most of those—but, at least in the African nations, more of those tons of were literal tons of stuff, like rice or water. Of course, some of the tons in the other countries will be literal tons too—but the difference between North American and the UK/IE/AU/NZ seems to be due to the figurative usage—as in I have tons of friends/problems/blog posts.
The Oxford English Dictionary has not updated its entries for these words since their first publication, more than 100 years ago. But three of the four have been used for informal descriptions of large quantities since the 1600s, and the fourth is the most American one.
The informal usage of
tons is not listed in the OED's 1913 entry for
ton, though it does list several colloquial uses where
ton means 100 (e.g. as a darts score or £100). The first use of
tons of money in the
Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) is not until the 1920s.
Tons of stuff shows up in the 1940s. Neither of those phrases is used much for decades after that, but the informal use of
tons picks up quickly after the 1980s. In the COHA corpus (1800–, the top nouns after
tons of are
coal,
steel and
water, while in GloWBE (2013) they are
money, people and
carbon.
And that, my friends, is the shortest blog post I've written in a long time! I await bunches of comments!
Posts
I'd guess that a lot of figurative uses will involve more complex structures that won't trigger on ngrams - a whole bunch of, a metric fuckton, and so forth.
ReplyDeleteMy perception as a Brit is that Americans often use "a bunch of" where Brits would say "lots of" or "loads of".
ReplyDeleteOops, I forgot to consider the singular versions! Will update this post when I can to be more comprehensive. (Reminder to self: There's a reason most of my posts are longer!)
ReplyDeleteDo you see more for tons in the GB results if you look for "tonnes"?
ReplyDeleteGood point that I meant to add. Yes, but it's overwhelmed by literal usage. Will have to add more on that when I update this post later.
DeleteHow about "masses of", which is what I'd tend to say. Or, indeed "loads of"....
ReplyDeleteAnd what about a shedload.
ReplyDeleteI was going to come back and mention that!
DeleteOr, not as family friendly, but I think 'a shit load' is used quite commonly in speech though is likely less prevelent in writing.
DeleteAs is "a shit ton" (and fuckton, especially "a metric fuckton", though not "* a metric shitton" that I can remember hearing/saying.)
DeleteWas "shed load" originally "shed full " ? To my ears a " shed load" is something in the traffic news.
DeleteWell, shedload (all one word) is in Chambers as "a large amount", As is shitload as "a very large amount".
DeleteDon’t forget binders full of women.
ReplyDelete