LYCOS RETRIEVER 
American English: British English
built 630 days ago
Words which exist in British English, but which have a different meaning in American English, can be very confusing. For a British person a purse is a small container for coins, not a handbag, as it is in the USA. In the USA pants are trousers, not underpants. A word which is a particularly nasty trap is billion, which means a hundred thousand in the USA. In Britain it used to mean a million million, but British usage is now increasingly following American.
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[For speakers of English as a foreign language - Note that this article is written in British English, not American English. There are differences both in spelling and vocabulary. Many of the British spelling differences are shared with Canadian English, such as programme and labour (vs. US "program" and "labor"). Others are optional, such as organisation (vs. organization).
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British English often keeps silent e when adding postfixes where American English doesn't. British ageing, judgement, routeing; American aging, judgment, routing. Arguement is found in some places (like where?), though the form argument is universal in British English.
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Spread by motion pictures, books, and television, Americanisms—especially American slang—have in large numbers found their way to Great Britain, more and more blurring the distinctions between the two forms of the English language. Although nonstandard phrases, such as “met up with” or “try out” (in the sense of test), may still encounter objections from purists, the very force of their objections shows how influential such words have been on everyday British English speechJ.L.D., JOEY LEE DILLARD, M.A., Ph.D.
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Some words have entered American English from the languages of its non-British settlers. The Spanish patio came into American English in the 1820s, macho in the 1920s. Italian has given much to American cooking, and the borrowings from Italian reflect this. Bologna, for example, is a cooked and smoked sausage made from minced beef and pork. French has given chowder, a soup containing fish, milk, and potatoes.
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In spoken English the main difference between American and British is the accent, but there are ... differences in the use and meaning of words. In everyday speech, however, these differences do not cause many problems.
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British English