shopping centre vs shoppng mall

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keannu

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[FONT=&#48148] Where do you like to shop?[/FONT][FONT=&#48148] * I enjoy shopping in a shopping centre because there's many shops in there.
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What's the difference between "shopping centre" and "shopping mall"?
Is it only British vs American?[/FONT]
 

GoesStation

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In AmE, shopping center is a somewhat old-fashioned term for a development in a city containing stores facing a parking lot. Nowadays we usually call such places shopping plazas or strip malls. A shopping mall or, more commonly, just mall, is a large building or group of buildings containing stores which face pedestrian areas. Until recently, malls were always enclosed; it's now fashionable to build open-air malls that vaguely imitate the downtown shopping areas of smaller towns of fifty years ago.
 

Charlie Bernstein

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Where do you like to shop? * I enjoy shopping in shopping centers because there are many shops there.
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What's the difference between "shopping centre" and "shopping mall"?
Is it only British versus American​ English?

A mall has a roof over the entire shopping area. Stores' entrances are in long, wide corridors.

A shopping center's stores' entrances face outdoors. They open directly onto sidewalks and parking lots. We also call them strip malls.

So the only difference I know of is how we spell center.

The outdoor type of mall GoesStation mentioned doesn't exist in my part of the country. I visited one in the state of Ohio. GS is right. It was an artificial village.
 
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GoesStation

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A mall has a roof over the entire shopping area. Stores' entrances are in long, wide corridors.

Not the recently-fashionable kind I mentioned.
The outdoor type of mall GoesStation mentioned doesn't exist in my part of the country. I visited one in the state of Ohio. GS is right. It was an artificial village.

Although the nearest of the new-ish artificial village-type malls to my home is in Ohio, the first one I visited was nearer to your home: it was in Hartford, Connecticut, less than 150 miles from the Maine border. :)
 

Charlie Bernstein

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Not the recently-fashionable kind I mentioned.


Although the nearest of the new-ish artificial village-type malls to my home is in Ohio, the first one I visited was nearer to your home: it was in Hartford, Connecticut, less than 150 miles from the Maine border. :)

Here's the one I went to in Ohio:

http://www.shopleviscommons.com

Mainers would laugh if they heard someone call Hartford "near." It's way down in SOUTHERN New England!

Actually, I was at a concert a while back, and the singer got a huge laugh (intentionally) when she said, "I have a friend from up here. In Providence!"

I was in a supermarket line here once. The woman in front of me knew the cashier, so they were gabbing. The cashier asked about a mutual friend she hadn't seen in a long time. The customer said, Oh, she moved down south."

The cashier asked where, and the customer said, "Pennsylvania!"

I usually don't use the words "cool" and "mall" in the same sentence, but the Grand Avenue in Milwaukee comes close. They put a glass roof over the back alleys of two city blocks and turned the space behind all the buildings into storefronts, with walking galleries going up several stories:

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keannu

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What about in the UK? Don't they have any difference between "shopping mall" and "shopping centre"?
 

emsr2d2

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In the UK, they're all called shopping centres, whether they have a roof or not. The word "mall" is, for us, American English.
 
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