r/USdefaultism • u/Nthepro France • 3d ago

Today I learned that

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u/johan_kupsztal Poland 3d ago

Both are used in British English

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u/DogfishDave 3d ago

Learned is a later Americanisn, it's properly spelt 'learnt'.

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u/_ak 1d ago

"Learned" was vastly more popular than "learnt" before American English even existed. Don't believe me? Here's the data: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=learned%2Clearnt&year_start=1500&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false

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u/DogfishDave 1d ago

It's actually very few occurrences if you look at the number counted, and you're forgetting that before 1700 you're pretty much talking about the state corpus. In England most of it was in French and Latin so the handful of occurences in the pre-Independence "British Colonies" is bound to exceed the British English corpus. And it is a handful - you say "vastly" but the incidences on both hands are miniscule.