nyota
Senior Member
- Joined
- Jun 9, 2009
- Member Type
- Interested in Language
- Native Language
- Polish
- Home Country
- Poland
- Current Location
- Australia
Till
At first I wanted to simply ask which form ( 'til, til, 'till or till) was correct since I've come across all of them, but then I found this neat explanation in Oxford and now my questions have drifted more towards the actual use: how do YOU, native speakers, use the abbreviations? Are the distinctions in the definition obvious to you? Is any of the options more acceptable than the other? I'm particularly interested in 'till, which seems to be a weird mix of till and until. Does it strike you as odd or has it become as acceptable as till or 'til?
A curious detail - typing in 'til in Longman dictionary led me straight to till/ til/ until while trying the same with Oxford took me nowhere, it didn't refer me to any entry.
Usage
In most contexts till and until have the same meaning and are interchangeable. The main difference is that till is generally considered to be the more informal of the two, and occurs less frequently than until in writing. Until also tends to be the natural choice at the beginning of a sentence: until very recently, there was still a chance of rescuing the situation.
Interestingly, while it is commonly assumed that till is an abbreviated form of until (the spellings ‘till and ’ til reflect this), till is in fact the earlier form. Until appears to have been formed by the addition of Old Norse und ‘as far as’ several hundred years after the date of the first records for till.
Source: online Oxford dictionaries
At first I wanted to simply ask which form ( 'til, til, 'till or till) was correct since I've come across all of them, but then I found this neat explanation in Oxford and now my questions have drifted more towards the actual use: how do YOU, native speakers, use the abbreviations? Are the distinctions in the definition obvious to you? Is any of the options more acceptable than the other? I'm particularly interested in 'till, which seems to be a weird mix of till and until. Does it strike you as odd or has it become as acceptable as till or 'til?
A curious detail - typing in 'til in Longman dictionary led me straight to till/ til/ until while trying the same with Oxford took me nowhere, it didn't refer me to any entry.