New thread--a curious thing

[Victoria Neufeldt]

Webster's New World College Dict has 'yikes' and 'yipe'.  'Yikes' is
x-referred to 'yipe'; it is a later addition -- wasn't in the 1980 copyright
update of the Second Edition, but is in the first copyright of the Third,
1988.  No geographical label for either entry, so presumably the evidence is
for currency of both in the U.S.

Victoria

Victoria Neufeldt
Merriam-Webster, Inc. P.O. Box 281
Springfield, MA 01102
Tel: 413-734-3134  ext 124
Fax: 413-827-7262



> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf
> Of Arnold Zwicky
> Sent: Tuesday, July 18, 2000 1:19 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: New thread--a curious thing
>
>
> bob haas asks about exclamatory YIPES vs. YIKES.  as bob reports, AHD3
> has only YIPE/YIPES; ditto WNI3; RHDEL has only YIPE; wentworth &
> flexner has none of the variants.  on the british side, OED2 and the
> 1998 chambers have only YIKE/YIKES; ayto & simpson has only YIKES; the
> Collins Cobuild has none of them.
>
> so the dictionaries - at least, the ones i have within a few feet
> of my computer - line up as american P vs. british K (insofar as
> they have entries at all).  this is odd, since haas and zwicky,
> both americans, are definitely in the K camp.
>
> is there actually a general british/american divide here (with a
> few exceptional speakers, like bob and me), or is this some artefact
> of dictionary construction?
>
> arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)
>