Re: ¿ ¿ ¿ amongst

[Beverly Flanigan]

Aha--I wonder if it's one of those words teachers like to drill into kids,
so that it comes out in college essays but not generally in
speech.  Thanks, David!

At 02:33 PM 7/25/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>DARE has only _amongst (hands of) them_ and _amongst you_ .  The latter
>is chiefly central Atlantic.
>
>It does not appear to be very frequent as measured by the Brown corpus
>or AH Word Frequency Book (both somewhat dated).  In the latter, it is
>recorded as appearing in 3rd grade reading.  It does not appear in the
>World Book Word List (formerly [?] used by the editors of World Book
>Encyclopedia).  In the Brown corpus it appears somewhere in the
>vicinity of 14,000 to 16,000 (p. 41 in the Rank List); the alphabetical
>arrangement within the rank list makes an exact position difficult.
>Thorndike's _Teacher's Word Book of 20,000 Words_ (1931) puts amongst
>in the 6th thousand.  It appears three time in James Joyce's Ulysses.
>Needless to say, it's not very frequent.  Very unscientific as googling
>is, when googled _amongst_ comes up with 3,430,000 hits; searched in
>Google News the number of hits is 3,340.  Among, respectively appears
>33,600,000 and 51,000.  That's a closer comparison than I would have
>expected, I think.
>
>Regards,
>David
>
>barnhart at highlands.com