The fact that you have to face the difficulty of choosing between American English or British English when studying English is a common thing. Not only need you to choose the way you pronounce a word, but you also have to use it in a suitable context. The meaning of an American word and a British word vary very little but the words themselves differ from each other a great deal.
Now you will have two paragraphs written differently in British and American way:
—David (York, England)
—David (New York, United States)
There are 4 differences in total. Could you find them all?
It is said that there are roughly 4,000 words in everyday speech that are used differently. And that’s why when we start to care and learn about these words, the list will just keep growing. It would be one hell of a mind to remember all the differences, and we all know that even the native speakers of BrE or NAmE would make mistakes.
These differences do make English a beauty and also make it one of the hardest languages to master. Hence, this series of articles is dedicated to this special part of English and will provide you with many popular words/phrases which are used everyday throughout English speaking countries. You will no longer use “pavement” or “sweets” when you are in America, you will use “sidewalk” and “candy” instead, isn’t that beautiful?
Here goes the all time famous crossword game. It is not hard but you still need a good knowledge of AmE, BrE differences if you want to reveal all the words. Good luck and don’t forget to “cheat” if you don’t have other options 
Each article of this series will provide a list of no more than 20 word pairs and a fun game or exercise for you to effectively learn by heart them. Keep practicing, and you shall be rewarded with a rich vocabulary of both BrE and AmE. Besides, our Online Study Page has a flashcard system for you to review the words if you like (i.e. type “car” in the search and see what you would get.)
All the words in this article and in the game have been added to the flashcard database with references to their counterparts in the definitions. You can keep playing the crossword game again and again to study, too!
Thank you for reading and I hope you will like it!
Subsribe to our feed now to be notified if a new learning article is up!
Reference:
- “InsideOut” – http://www.macmillanenglish.com/insideout/Portal.htm
Written by IT Team
