unique british words

I speak English, but making a list of British words reminded me that I don’t always speak the same English as the people around me. Moving from Canada to England has changed parts of my vocabulary without making every unfamiliar word feel natural.

Some now come out before I think about them. Others still feel as though I’m borrowing somebody else’s language, and a few can cause actual confusion because I already use the word for something different. These are the ones that stood out when I looked back at my vocabulary in summer 2025.

Jumper and bin settled in nicely

A jumper is what I’d have called a sweater, and I use jumper now. It’s a fun word to say and has become part of my everyday vocabulary. That switch was much easier than some of the others.

Bin has settled in too. Back home I’d have told someone to put the garbage in the garbage, which sounds fairly ridiculous once you think about it. Now, when I’m talking to my partner, I ask whether the bins have gone out or been collected. The word is short and does the job.

Quid took a little longer to feel normal. At first, saying it made me feel as though I was announcing that I was British now. Then it started coming out on its own, including when I was horrified by a cafe charging six quid for a coffee.

Purse and handbag are still different things in my head

At my first job in the UK, I worked at a college. My boss messaged from another part of the building asking me to bring her purse. To me, a purse was the whole bag containing her wallet, keys and phone. She meant the wallet.

Here, handbag covers the bag I’d call a purse, while purse can refer to the thing inside it. I still get confused, so I haven’t adopted the British use of purse. When I say wallet and purse, I mean two different objects.

My own everyday bag is a small cross-body bum bag, which I like because I can’t overfill it or make it too heavy. Back home I’d call it a fanny pack.

Pants and pavement can make things awkward

Trousers means the clothes I’d call pants, while pants in Britain means underwear. I gave the example of telling someone I needed to buy new pants because I’d ripped mine. You can see how that conversation could go somewhere I hadn’t intended.

Then there’s pants meaning something bad, which felt a step too far for me. I was still getting used to the clothing and underwear distinction. Adding another meaning wasn’t helping.

Pavement causes a different kind of confusion. Here it’s the bit beside the road that I’d call a sidewalk. In my childhood, pavement meant the surface where the cars drove, so my mum would tell me not to play on the pavement. Those two versions put you on different sides of the kerb.

The potato problem

I do say crisps now, but I still sometimes switch between Canadian and British uses of chips while talking to my partner. Canadian chips are British crisps, and British chips are what I’d call fries. I can mean either version without warning anyone that I’ve changed languages halfway through.

I love all those forms of potato. The difficulty is making sure we’re discussing the same one. Knowing the translation doesn’t necessarily stop an old word coming out when I’m not thinking about it.

Squash was another food-and-drink word that confused me early on. My first association is still a vegetable, although I now use it for the fruit cordial you dilute with water. At home, we used frozen juice concentrate, mixed the whole can in a jug with water and kept the jug in the fridge. The drinks I grew up with came with a different routine as well as different names.

Chuffed stopped being a joke

I started saying chuffed, meaning pleased, ironically because I thought it sounded silly in my accent. Now it just comes out. I particularly like chuffed to bits, which is such a pleasant way of putting it.

Mobile has also replaced cell phone for me. I suspect hearing and using something frequently makes the switch easier, because mobile comes up all the time. Brolly, meaning umbrella, still feels unnatural, and loo hasn’t replaced bathroom. I’ll still ask my partner to add toilet paper to the shopping rather than loo roll.

Kitchen roll has made more progress. Sometimes paper towel, the term I’d have used back home, doesn’t immediately come to me any more. That’s a strange part of living abroad for long enough, remembering the new word easily while briefly losing the one you started with.

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