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I stumbled upon this sentence:

I accuse myself and others as having been irrational in the way we have been using statistics on a key notion of rationality.

Is there a difference in meaning/usage between "accuse X as" and "accuse X of"? Are they used in different contexts? Intuitively I prefer "accuse X of" every time.

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    I don't think there's a difference. I wouldn't use "accuse X as irrational" here either but "accuse X of being irrational". There may be a dialect where "as" is normal, though. It's really hard to make absolutist statements about usage when so many people use the language and so many are convinced that because they're native speakers, their usage is always correct, except for those obvious moments when even perfect knowledge of one's own idiolect fails and one misspeaks. That's a failing of many a politician, I've noticed, especially over the past 12 months.
    – user21497
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 15:28
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    There's certainly a difference in usage statistics. Google Books accused as:468K hits, accused of:11,400K hits. Using "as" in contexts where "of" would be valid conveys nothing to me apart from an indication of possible illiteracy. But it's fine in constructions like "stand accused as a {thief}", for example.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 18:24
  • Just came across this for the first time: dmarge.com/2020/11/…
    – hippietrail
    Commented Nov 28, 2020 at 7:04

1 Answer 1

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You usually accuse [someone] of [some act of wrongdoing] (e.g. "I accuse him of bigamy").

Less commonly, you can accuse [someone] as [some type of wrongdoer], a form which often involves the passive voice, in conjunction with "stand" (e.g. "He stands accused as a bigamist").

Thus in OP's example, where having been irrational is a transgression/wrongdoing, the correct preposition is "of".

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  • How accepted is it to use "as"? I first tried to write "they accused her as a witch", but I was not sure if "accused as" is grammatically correct, so I replaced it with "they accused her of being a witch" but that phrase had to be repeated multiple times and it looked too cumbersome. "they accused her of a witch" is incorrect, right?
    – Damn Vegetables
    Commented Feb 12, 2022 at 18:55

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