Whereas or where as? One word or two? Commonly confused words (27-28)
6-minute read
(27 & 28 of 44 commonly confused words)
(This is an updated and substantially expanded version of an earlier post.)
Where as???
Yonks ago, reading The Times, I was struck by this sentence: ‘He was apolitical. He never mentioned Iraq, where as some students were vociferous.’
Hence this post.
Is it correct to write whereas as two words nowadays?
Short (and long) answer: no.
Moreover, any spellchecker software worth its salt will flag it up for you.
It had never occurred to me before that whereas might be two words.
Of course, it could easily be since it is simply a combination of where and as.
Several ‘words’ are sometimes written as one unit and sometimes as two, for example under way and underway, on line and online, and so forth. Sometimes, whether you write them one way or t’other is simply a matter of house style or language variety or personal preference. At other times, the difference can be grammatical, e.g. anymore.
But whereas is not one of those. No current dictionary that I know of accepts the two-word spelling. In contrast, the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors specifically cites whereas (along with whereabouts, whereby, whereof, wheresoever, and whereupon) as ‘words’ that must be conjoined.
A quick check in the Oxford English Corpus (OEC) shows that whereas whereas as a single word appears over 100,000 times, as two words it’s in the hundreds.
The ratio is somewhat higher in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), giving where as at around 3 per cent of occurrences, and in the Global Corpus of Web-based English (GloWbE) it is even higher, at around 6 per cent.
In that last corpus how often it is used per million words varies considerably from country to country (data from 20 countries is included). By that yardstick, British English usage is 50 per cent higher than U.S. or Canadian. Intriguingly, highest of all is Pakistan, at nearly twice the British English frequency.
It is impossible to give an exact figure for it as two words because searching for the string where as also retrieves sentences such as ‘Wolfowitz joined the bank in 2005 after working at the Pentagon, where as deputy defense secretary he was…’. However, a quick visual scan of where as suggests at least 95 per cent are miswritings of whereas. As has been pointed out, a more fastidious punctuator would have inserted a comma between where and as in examples like the one just cited, but the modern fashion is that less is definitely more in terms of commas.
The OEC data also suggests that split where as occurs often in news and blog sources (come back subs, all is forgiven!). Just what do they teach those journalists these days?
Was it ever two words?
Historically, it was originally two words. In its very earliest use – in a written citation from about 1350 – it was a relative adverb corresponding to where, a use which is preserved in The Book of Common Prayer (1549) section on Holy Communion:
That … oure heartes maye surely there bee fixed, where as true ioyes are to be founde.
The earliest OED example of whereas used as a subordinating conjunction is from The Paston Letters (1426–7), in the meaning, now largely confined to legal writing (of which more later), ‘taking into consideration the fact that’:
Where as þe seyd William Paston, by assignement and commaundement of þe seyd Duk of Norffolk…was þe styward of þe seyd Duc of Norffolk.
(As you will no doubt have worked out, the þ symbol stands for the ‘th’ sound. It was used in Old English, is still used in Icelandic, and is called a thorn since it begins that word.)
In its principal modern meaning (‘in contrast’) to introduce a concessive clause, it first appears in Coverdale’s Bible (1535), also as two words:
There are layed vp for vs dwellynges of health & fredome, where as we haue lyued euell.
(From Book 2 of Esdras, not included in the AV.)
The first OED citation for it as one word is in Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1 (written before 1616).
I deriued am From Lionel Duke of Clarence…; whereas hee, From Iohn of Gaunt doth bring his Pedigree.
So, while there are historical precedents for the two-word spelling, whereas is one of those words that current spelling convention decrees should not be sundered.
As the first clause, beginning a sentence?
Majority usage seems to favour putting the concessive clause introduced by whereas as the second (or further) part of the sentence, as in the Shakespearean example earlier and as in the following:
He’s the one who is moving on whereas her parents are stuck with the story, are stuck in the past.
He lived through his era, whereas so many of his friends died in racing accidents.
It is worth noting that the comma preceding whereas seems to be optional in these examples, though I think, being generally a pro-comma man, I would often be tempted to insert one,
Now, the clause starting with Whereas is quite often put first in the sentence, as in this next example:
Whereas there used to be a dozen different sets of potentially applicable organic standards, now there’s only one.
Some people object mightily to this use and suggest that it is somehow wrong. My counterarguments would be that a) it is widespread (which isn’t, admittedly, necessarily a recommendation); b) putting it first makes it possible to give end focus to the second clause, as in the example above; and c) that the OED notes ‘(The principal clause usually precedes, but sometimes follows as in 2.)’. The number 2 the OED refers to is that legal use as a preamble we’ve already encountered.
As regards relative frequencies of the two structures, a simple comparison of whereas and Whereas in a carefully balanced OEC general corpus gives a ratio of very roughly 4:1. However, in a corpus of academic journals, that ratio increases to about 13:1 – which suggests that the academics in question prefer to go with the traditional clause order – or their editors do.
That ‘legal’ whereas
We’ve just looked at whereas used to connect clauses while contrasting them.
As in the Paston Letter quotation earlier, the word is often used, especially in U.S. laws, to introduce a clause, or usually several clauses, setting out the reasons for something.
Brian Garner, the doyen of writing on legal usage, suggests that such use in a preamble is the ‘archetypal legalism’ and is best replaced by a heading such as Recitals or Background, containing simple clauses. He also notes that whereas one arbiter of style has disparaged the use of whereas instead of while as ‘stuffy’, whereas can play a useful role: it is preferable to while when while is potentially ambiguous as between its temporal and its concessive meaning:
I developed the arguments and marshaled authorities, while [read whereas if the idea of simultaneity is absent] she wrote the brief itself.
Does it have other meanings?
Yes.
1. Historically, it was used adverbially to mean simply ‘where’, as noted at the beginning of this post and repeated below, but that use died out long ago, except as a poetic archaism, as illustrated in the second quotation below from the Arts & Crafts designer and writer William Morris:
That…oure heartes maye surely there bee fixed, where as true ioyes are to be founde.
And quickly too he gat | Unto the place whereas the Lady sat.
W. Morris, Earthly Paradise ii. 655, 1868.
2. Whereas is also a noun.
It can mean ‘A statement introduced by “whereas”; the preamble of a formal document.’
While the contrary remains unproved, such a Whereas must be a most inadequate ground for the present Bill.
S. T. Coleridge, Plot Discovered 23, 1795.
The rule seems to be that if a candidate can recite half a dozen policy positions by rote and name some foreign nations and leaders, one shouldn’t point out that he sure seems a few whereases shy of an executive order.
Slate.com, 2000.
The above is a superlative example of the creative potential of the idiom frame ‘a few X short/shy of a Y’, e.g. ‘a few fries short of a Happy Meal’.
As a further historical footnote, it is interesting that the legalistic, ritual use of whereas as a preamble to legal documents led to its being used as a noun, defined as follows in the Urban Dictionary of its day, Grose’s 1796 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:
To follow a whereas; to become a bankrupt…: the notice given in the Gazette that a commission of bankruptcy is issued out against any trader, always beginning with the word whereas.
References
“whereas, adv. and conj. (and n.).” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/228215. Accessed 4 January 2021.
Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage, 3rd edn. Accessed online 4 January 2021.
New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors, eds., Stevenson, A. and Brown. L. Accessed online 4 January 2021.
