Timeline for British English - “In two hours time”
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 18 at 12:10 | comment | added | Francis Davey | "Common People" by Pulp - reasonably representative of British English and a hit song - has "in thirty seconds time" in its lyrics, which sounds entirely natural to my British English ear. | |
| Jul 15, 2018 at 8:25 | comment | added | user184130 | Perhaps the reason two commenters think it sounds like the "other" dialect of English is because it is relatively rare in both? Also, being redundant is not "incorrect"; we often use redundancy in language for a variety of reasons. | |
| Apr 25, 2012 at 17:08 | vote | accept | Jeremy | ||
| Apr 25, 2012 at 10:37 | comment | added | Toby | 2 cents use case: If I was writing in a rigid formal style, say for a academic paper I would probably use "time", but would otherwise not generally use it | |
| Apr 24, 2012 at 15:35 | comment | added | Jeremy | I think I'm starting to get it. It seems to me that time in this sense just means "from now". So it does encode additional information, if that's right. | |
| Apr 24, 2012 at 15:34 | comment | added | Brett Reynolds | In the Corpus of current American English, the frame [in x minute (') time] has a frequency of about 0.08 per million words in the Fiction subcorpus, where it is most common. In the British National Corpus, it's about 0.50 per million words in the spoken subcorpus. This suggests that it's rare in both dialects, but less common in American English. | |
| Apr 24, 2012 at 15:33 | comment | added | DavidR | No, but you could say "In 2 hours (time) he'll have a meeting for 3 hours." | |
| Apr 24, 2012 at 15:29 | comment | added | Jeremy | An American would never add "time" after a unit of time, so it's odd to me that you call the usage more American. That's a very interesting point about duration. Could you say something like "In 2 hours, he'll have a meeting for 3 hours time"? | |
| Apr 24, 2012 at 15:27 | history | answered | DavidR | CC BY-SA 3.0 |