"Railway"

[Michael Quinion]

Lynne Murphy said:

> One of the things that gives away AmE speakers in Britain (not that there
> aren't a lot of things that give us away), is the use of 'train station'
> rather than 'railway station', which is what's said in BrE.  The increased
> use of 'train station' in BrE is one of those things (one of those many,
> many, many things) that some (particularly older) BrE speakers like to
> complain about to me.

Usage is strongly correlated with age. My guess is that few people in
Britain under the age of about 30-35 say anything other than "train
station". But I'd be surprised to hear a native British speaker use
"railroad" rather than "railway". The former turns up often enough in the
newspapers I read, such as the Guardian, but mostly in a US context. This
is no doubt why the Oxford Corpus includes examples. Or have I just
demonstrated once again how far behind the linguistic times I am?


--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
E-mail: wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
Web: http://www.worldwidewords.org

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