131 British English Words That Can Be Confusing to American Speakers

Some of them look like American English words but mean something completely different. Examples include pissed, dishy, homely, jumper, mooch, and others.

Image by the author (composite includes crops of an image by Steve Buissinne from Pexels and of a photo by Samson Katt, also from Pexels)

According to the current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, there are 171,476 words in use today, along with 47,156 archaic ones, which seems enormous, until you consider that idioms and other various expressions also require a dictionary.

But this article will be only about words, and common words at that — mostly simple and compound nouns, along with a few verbs and adjectives.

I’ve spent a good portion of my time on earth so far learning English, so this should be fun.

The list below is one with regulars in British English that often puzzle American speakers. Some of these words may be familiar to you, while others may still be opaque, especially if you read paperbacks and don’t have the option of using the dictionary on the spot, as I often do on my Kindle — though sometimes with limited results, as it will define an adjective by referring to the noun, for instance, and then you wouldn’t have an easy way to see the definition for the noun. Or you would encounter a word with different…