Proper noun

Singular British English

Plural -

British English

1. The English language as written and spoken in Britain, especially in England, contrasted with American English and that of other places.
   • 1861, “The Shakespeare Mystery”, in The Atlantic Monthly, v 8, n 47, Boston: Ticknor and Fields, p 258 (note):

     We shall not say that this is British English; but we willingly confess that it is not American English.

   • 1863, George Perkins Marsh, “The English Language in America”, in Lectures on the English Language, 4th ed., New York: Charles Scribner, p 667:

     Some noticeable and general differences between American and British English may be explained by the fact, that considerable bodies of Englishmen sometimes emigrated from the same vicinity, and that in their new home they and their multiplied descendants have kept together and continued to employ dialect peculiarities of their native speech, or retained words of general usage which elsewhere perished.

   • 1868, Richard Grant White, “Words and their Uses: British English and American English”, in The Galaxy, v 4, New York, p 102:

     Now, according to my observation, no man whom the Dean of Canterbury, or the Public Orator of Cambridge, would accept as a speaker of pure English, says, with thick utterance, “a gloss of ayull;” and yet thousands of their countrymen do speak thus, and this peculiarity of British English passes very gradually away as social and mental culture increase, until among the best-bred and best-educated people it vanishes, and is heard no more than it or a nasal twang is heard among similar people here.

2. The English language as written and spoken in Britain and much of the Commonwealth of Nations, contrasted with American English.

Abbreviations

• BrE
• Brit

British English, or UK English (BrE, BE, en-GB), is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere. The Oxford English Dictionary applies the term to English "as spoken or written in the British Isles; esp[ecially] the forms of English usual in Great Britain...", reserving "Hiberno-English" for "The English language as spoken and written in Ireland".

There are slight regional variations in formal written English in the United Kingdom (for example, although the words wee and little are interchangeable in some contexts, one is more likely to see wee written by someone from northern Britain (and especially Scotland) or from Northern Ireland than by someone from Southern England or Wales). Nevertheless, there is a meaningful degree of uniformity in written English within the United Kingdom, and this could be described as "British English". The forms of spoken English, however, vary considerably more than in most other areas of the world where English is spoken, and a uniform concept of "British English" is therefore more difficult to apply to the spoken language. According to Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English (p. 45), "[f]or many people...especially in England [the phrase British English] is tautologous," and it shares "all the ambiguities and tensions in the word British, and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within a range of blurring and ambiguity".