<inline-pps>
A lot of this post disappeared in a puff of phosphorescence<mea-culpa>
'Pilot error' as engineers used to say when I'd done something silly. Over-enthusistic deletion (and hasty reading of deletion warnings).
</mea-culpa>So only the PS survived, until today (31 July 2025). </inline-pps>
In a recent episode of The Week in Westminster a guest referred to Trump playing his cards 'close to his chest', which I felt would have been more appropriate as 'close to his vest'.
<autobiographical-note>
Ever since, in my early teens, I came across a book entitled (sic for Heaven's sake...<rant frequency="You may have heard this before">
I know acadenics are forced, on pain of non-publication, to use 'titled' when referring to books, because of the ubiquity of American style guides, but the requirements of American English (AmE) (with its cultural background of a society without a peerage) has the luxury of one word assigned to each of two meanings: titled of a book, entitled of a person. British English, however, has three meanings:
- Entitled (in the preppy AmE sense) of a person
- Entitled (in the sense of bearing a title) of a book
- Titled (in the sense of being a member of the peerage) of a person
'Two's into three: I cannot do it' as we used to say in the arithmetic class. So, in BrE we don't have that luxury and simply have to use the two words in three senses.
</rant>...). A Vest-Pocket Ready Reckoner, a relic of my mother's (whom saints preserve and they better had) work at Technicolor. 'But vests don't have pockets,' I complained. 'They do in America,' she said; 'over there it means waistcoat.'
So, until my recent reference to corpuses...
<here-be-irregular-plurals>
(and although the English Corpora site wants me to call them 'corpora' I'm sticking with Fowler – who prefers -s plurals in most cases [a rule that I have added to with this codicil: 'especially when the plural is irregular']).
</here-be-irregular-plurals>...I believed that the AmE version of 'waistcoat' was always 'vest'
</autobiographical-note>Then, in the same week as that The Week in Westminster programme, a prospector in McLevy in the New World used the word 'waistcoat' – leading me to these corpus searches:
As near as makes no odds, the 'chest' and 'vest' versions are about equally common in AmE.Whereas in BrE there is a clear preference for 'chest':
And I suspect these two 'vests' may have an American context.
I turned finally to the Google Ngram Viewer, which makes it (suspiciously? Discuss) easy to compare AmE and BrE usage, and got these results (looking just at the words vest and waistcoat). 'Vest' has always been the more common, but usually only by a factor of about 5.
Meanwhile in BrE the two are less extremely distributed, but usually only by a factor of about 2 (which, given that in BrE the words always refer to distinct garments, I find interesting.
<autobiog>
I certainly have experience of a lot more vests than waistcoats, though admittedly waistcoats tend to be more comment-worthy than vests.
</autobiog>Enough,
b
Update:2025.06.03.17:50 – Added PS
PS
Typical! There was I talking about AmE usage, and the more I looked into it the wronger I got. COHA shows that 'vest' can be used to mean waistcost in AmE and often does, but 'waistcoat' certainly exists. Until WWII it was relatively common, but since then its appearance has been fairly wan:
 |
Graph showing AE usage of waistcoat approximately aligned – on my screen (but YMMV)– with corpus data |
