Bonkers for Britishisms: the UK terms Americans have embraced

The Guardian

12-04-2025

The Americani(s)zation of British English is often described as a linguistic disaster – frustrations over imported words or usages, from 'awesome' to 'ATM', are well documented.
But in recent years, there's been growing interest in the opposite phenomenon: Britishisms that have made their way into American English. These days, it's not uncommon to hear Americans describing a single event as a 'one-off' or noting that a perfect assessment is 'spot-on'.
People on both sides of the Atlantic have complained about this exchange. Britons have long argued that Americanisms are 'poisoning' or even 'killing' their language, but it must be alive and well, since some Americans vent about the opposite; they feel that their compatriots are being a bit twee when they 'impersonate an Englishman'. Others, however, welcome the cross-pollination – not least, apparently, young Americans.
Gen Z is helping to fuel the import of Britishisms into American English, according to researchers at Northern Arizona University, who collaborated with the language-learning platform Babbel to investigate the phenomenon. Using a database called the Lancaster-Northern Arizona Corpus of American Spoken English – a joint project with the UK's Lancaster University – the team analyzed 1,000 hours of spoken American English recorded between January 2023 and October 2024. In the process, they identified the most commonly used Britishisms in American English.
The most common was bonkers, meaning 'absurd', which was applied to topics from politics to sports to internet trends, according to the language learning platform Babbel. The word is believed to derive from 'bonk', meaning 'hit on the head', and first appears in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1943; at the time, a soldier wrote that losing contact with his family would cause him to 'go bonkers'. By 1965, it had appeared in the US, in a New York Times article describing a film character, and by the 2000s, it was common in the US. Back in the UK, it got renewed life from Dizzee Rascal's 2009 hit of the same name, which later appeared in the US show Rick and Morty, the researchers note.
The rest of the top 10:
Amongst (rather than 'among'), whose use has nearly quadrupled in the US over the past four decades
Queue, whose frequent use on tech platforms such as Netflix has given its British meaning – what Americans would generally call a 'line' – new life in the US
Wonky, meaning a bit off
Cheeky, meaning a bit naughty or indulgent, as frequently used by Mike Myers (a Canadian with English parents) on Saturday Night Live in the 1990s
Snarky, often used to describe early internet discourse and sites such as Gawker
Cheers, which has long been used while clinking glasses in the US but has started to mean 'thanks' in some contexts
Keen, meaning enthusiastic
Maths, rather than just math, which has become more familiar in the US due to international academic work and social media
Nil, meaning zero, which is turning up in online gaming
In addition to the list of words, researchers examined the demographics of the speakers. They found that the use of 'bonkers' is most common among gen Z, whose members accounted for 77% of uses in the database. People aged 66 and older didn't use it at all. Meanwhile, 90% of 'bonkers' speakers were women, and 97% lived in urban areas.
Esteban Touma, a linguistic expert with Babbel, said gen Z's use of Britishisms was a result of 'cultural globalization', pointing to the impact of social media as well as streaming services that give Americans greater access to UK television and films. Love Island, for instance, has taught Americans about 'getting the ick' and 'grafting'; meanwhile, British musicians including Charli xcx and Harry Styles continue to make their mark in the US. British media outlets, including the Guardian and the Mail, have a growing influence on the US political conversation.
And for the most part, Americans seem to welcome the linguistic imports. We have occasionally complained about British incursions into American English – a US literary critic named Richard Grant White, who coined the term 'Briticism' in 1868, was enraged by the use of 'awfully' to mean 'very', as Ben Yagoda notes on his blog, Not One-Off Britishisms. But generally speaking, the vitriol is reserved for Americanisms infiltrating Britain: Yagoda, perhaps America's premier tracker of Britishisms, didn't hear any complaints from Americans over his book Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English (adapted last year for a Guardian story).
So why do Americans embrace Britishisms? Sometimes, Yagoda says, it's just 'Darwinian': 'it's better, it's more useful, it's more vivid'. 'Gobsmacked' is far more colorful than 'surprised'; the phrase 'go missing' to describe a missing person is so useful, and thus so embedded in American English, that most Americans saying it (including me) probably didn't realize it's borrowed. In other cases, Yagoda says, users of Britishisms – especially writers – are just looking for a new way to say something. In either direction, the exchange of phrases is a healthy thing, Yagoda says: 'It aerates the language a little bit.'
But of course, there is a charm in different dialects – who hasn't chatted with friends about regional quirks, whether between Dallas and Los Angeles or New York and London? Treasuring the differences between British and American English, and fretting about the increasing UK use of 'cookies' for biscuits or TV 'seasons' instead of series, is understandable.
But Yagoda isn't worried. The difference between dialects is 'still very distinct, and there's no reason to think it won't be in the future'. While certain phrases are traded between the countries, countless other subtle differences hold – going 'round' someone's house (UK) rather than 'over to' their house (US); saying things are 'different to' rather than 'different from' each other; having 'an ice cream' versus 'having ice cream'.
There's no reason for these usages to cross the ocean, Yagoda says: unlike 'gobsmacked' and 'surprised', 'different to' is no better than 'different from', so why would anyone make the switch? It would be bonkers. In the meantime, new Britishisms and Americanisms are enriching their home countries all the time, Yagoda says. 'Some of them will come over one way or the other, if they're cool and flashy and funny, but the majority, I think, will stay put.'