turn out the light or turn on the light?

[davecoote]

i am an english teacher who has discovered a text book which states "turn out the light" any comments? i am sure the phrase is "turn off"

 

[emsr2d2]

I am an English teacher who has discovered a text book which states "turn out the light". Any comments? I am sure the phrase is "turn off".

In BrE, we use both but I think "turn out" is even more common in AmE.

Please note that it's important on this forum to use correctly capitalised and punctuated English in our posts at all times, especially if you are an English teacher and a native speaker, both of which are stated in your member info. Learners read posts and will take particular notice of spelling, grammar, punctuation and capitalisation used by teachers. Ensuring that we write our posts correctly helps to avoid the learners getting into bad habits.

 

[5jj]

i am an english teacher who has discovered a text book which states "turn out the light" any comments? i am sure the phrase is "turn off"

Are you sure that you are a native speaker? This seems an odd question if you are. I am sure that most of us would tend to use one of these, whichever we choose, in preference to the other, but we know of the existence of the other.

 

[Tdol]

Turn out may be less used nowadays, but it's fine. I would teach turn off before it, though.

 

[BobK]

:up: I use 'turn off', but I imagine in the days when houses were lit by Gas lighting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
both 'down' and 'out' were common.

b

 

[bhaisahab]

:up: I use 'turn off', but I imagine in the days when houses were lit by Gas lighting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
both 'down' and 'out' were common.

b

Indeed they were, Bob. There was gas lighting in my house until I was nine years old.

 

[BobK]

I've never lived in such a house, but a gaslight set fire to my hair on a staircase at the Watford Palace Theatre in a slow-moving queue for the bar! ;-)

b

 

[Tdol]

Indeed they were, Bob. There was gas lighting in my house until I was nine years old.

Lincoln's Inn still has some gas street lamps.

 

[bhaisahab]

Lincoln's Inn still has some gas street lamps.

We lived in Teddington in Middlesex, in a row of four early Victorian houses down a lane off the main road. The electricty board refused to install electricity until all four property owners agreed. There was one old lady who refused and it wasn't until she died in 1959, at the age of 99, that we were able to get it done.

 

[Tdol]

I stayed in a flat in Lincoln's Inn and it had a Dickensian romance about it when walking through at night.

 

[SoothingDave]

"Turn out the lights" seems fine to me.

The Pennsylvania Dutch are known to say "outen the light."