Don't use "seldom" any longer.

[sitifan]

The YouTuber says that the word "seldom" is outdated. Use "rarely" instead. Do native speakers agree with what she teaches?

 

[5jj]

This chart shows that 'seldom' is used much less than it used to be.

 

[Skrej]

It may not be used as much, but I don't agree that's a valid reason to avoid using it altogether. I still use it myself.

I doubt anyone would think twice upon hearing it.

 

[jutfrank]

I agree with her. I seldom teach the word, and very rarely even see it in more recent materials.

 

[dunchee]

To be honest, I don't remember the last time I read or heard of "seldom," so I thought maybe this word was really rarely used. Out of curiosity I did some searches, and to my surprise, they're more than I expected. So I guess I just didn't pay attention to the word.

All the search criteria below are limited to years between 2020 and 2025.

- TV news:
archive.org (TV news)
Well, a lot.

- movies and TV programs:
getyarn.io
Okay, not too many, but it's there. I watched The Sandman(2022) and Lockwood & Co(2023), and I don't remember hearing "seldom" ...

- my book collection.
45 books(*1), but many of them weren't published in the past six years. At the very least Stephen King still writes "seldom" in his You Like It Darker(2024) and Fairy Tale(2022).

(*1) I used Calibre's full-text search function and searched books I collected in the past six years. Calibre is an e-book management software.

 

[jutfrank]

I sometimes use this quick and easy-to-use tool, which to put it simply gives data on word frequency by way of a value ranging from 1 to 7:

SUBTLEX-UK: A new and improved word frequency database for British English

The score of 3.319 for 'seldom' against 4.127 for 'rarely' means that 'rarely' is approximately six times more frequent, in this British English database. I believe its corpora are compiled mostly from TV and film.

 

[kunjabihari]

The YouTuber says that the word "seldom" is outdated. Use "rarely" instead. Do native speakers agree with what she teaches?

I'm not a native English speaker, but I am an English editor with a C2 level, been one since the 1990s.

I can't remember the last time I saw the word. Honestly. It's definitely been years I last saw or heard it. That surely accounts for something, don't you think? And I'm talking all kinds of websites, conversations (online and otherwise), articles from all kinds of topics, even relatively new books (written in the last decade or so). Unless the word has been avoiding me on purpose, I don't know what to tell you.

I see this thread is pretty old, 30 Dec 2006. Funny how English has changed since then. Our beloved Internet, which we use for so many things daily, our indispensable tool and workforce, has largely contributed, I think. It was different when it was mostly among native speakers. As soon as it started to mix with all nations, who don't understand English the same way, such changes were inevitable.

 

[teechar]

I can't remember the last time I saw the word. Honestly. It's definitely been years since I last saw or heard it.

It's not that rare at all. It may be on the decline, but it's still very much alive and in use.

I see this thread is pretty old, 30 Dec 2006. Funny how English has changed since then.

@sitifan has been a member since 2006, but this thread was started yesterday.

 

[Annabel Lee]

While I realize that many dictionaries define seldom as meaning rarely, in my own usage and experience I find seldom to be a bit more positive in meaning, or less negative, than rarely. To me, seldom means "not often," whereas rarely means "hardly ever" or "almost never." The two examples below are representative of my personal usage:

I seldom come across people who like to talk about grammar.​

I rarely come across people who have learned to diagram sentences.​

When I use rarely (or hear rarely used) as above, before the main verb, it tends to be stressed, whereas seldom tends not to be stressed (in my usage and experiece) in the same position. Both seem capable of inducing inversion: Rarely do I come across people who have learned to diagram sentences. There's actually a famous song featuring inversion with seldom:

Home, home on the range,​

Where the deer and the antelope play,​

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, [= Where a discouraging word is seldom heard]​

And the skies are not cloudy all day.​

 

[kunjabihari]

While I realize that many dictionaries define seldom as meaning rarely, in my own usage and experience I find seldom to be a bit more positive in meaning, or less negative, than rarely. To me, seldom means "not often," whereas rarely means "hardly ever" or "almost never." The two examples below are representative of my personal usage:

I seldom come across people who like to talk about grammar.​

I rarely come across people who have learned to diagram sentences.​

When I use rarely (or hear rarely used) as above, before the main verb, it tends to be stressed, whereas seldom tends not to be stressed (in my usage and experiece) in the same position. Both seem capable of inducing inversion: Rarely do I come across people who have learned to diagram sentences. There's actually a famous song featuring inversion with seldom:

Home, home on the range,​

Where the deer and the antelope play,​

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, [= Where a discouraging word is seldom heard]​

And the skies are not cloudy all day.​

I have always had the same impression as you regarding the meaning of seldom/rarely. I just commented that this is truly my experience, that seldom is rarely found, if ever, in most texts I read, and that has been going on for the last decade or so. And it is probably because it's so rare that I actually remember when it appears, and it appears... almost never. In my case, to be fair, I might as well get rid of the "almost." Perhaps I've been reading too much material that's been recently written. It's not on purpose. Until about a decade ago, I exclusively read only old stuff, where seldom and other such words were not rare at all.

Another important note: The deterioration of linguistic sophistication in the English language mostly seems to be taking place in English-speaking countries, while the English scholars of other countries don't seem to have that problem, so the language, paradoxically enough, is longer preserved in its older iterations in other countries. (Before you say anything, keep in mind that scholarly material is never a percentage majority of language output in any nation. My comment is inspired by the perception of such phenomena in the colloquial part, and especially in spoken English.) I'm not sure how to feel about this.

The more we use something, the more rapidly it changes. Is that it then?

 

[kunjabihari]

It's not that rare at all. It may be on the decline, but it's still very much alive and in use.


@sitifan has been a member since 2006, but this thread was started yesterday.

As for the dates, my bad. Thanks! I'm new here.
As for seldom and such, I'm just relating my true experience. I used to read exclusively older material until about a decade ago, and seldom was not seldom there at all. English was more, shall we say, aesthetically pleasing back then, at least to literary connoisseurs. We seem to have become too much business and too little art in that regard.