Champ at the bit or chomp at the bit? Which is correct? Commonly confused words (31-32)
On one of my posts, a reader commented how much it annoyed them when people said chomp at the bit rather than champ at the bit and suggested I should blog about it. So here goes.
To quote verbatim, my correspondent (there must, surely, be a more up-to-date word for someone who comments on a blog post) wrote: ‘I hear a lot of people who say “chomping at the bit” rather than “champing at the bit” which whether or not it has come into common use is wrong and smacks of a poor education and a poor vocabulary.’
That raises two obvious major questions.
Q1: Has chomp … in fact come into common use?
In other words, how common is it vs champ?
(And, might there be ‘regional’ variation?)
Q2: Who decides whether it is ‘wrong’? What do they say?
It also raised in my mind…
Q3: What do editors and others who care, think?
And, of course,
Q4: What do these words mean, and what is the history of and relation between the two forms – and any others, such as chafing.
I’ll answer the first three each in two parts, a short answer and then a longer one for anyone who wants more information. For the sake of (relative) brevity in this post, Q4 requires a separate post.
Q1: Has chomp come into common use?
Short answer:
Yes. And in most varieties of English it is more often used than champ.
Longer answer:
It depends where in the English-speaking world you’re talking about, and also what kind of writing.
I consulted six sets of data: The Oxford English Corpus February 2014, Oxford Monitor Corpus April 2018, the News on the Web (NOW) corpus, the Global Corpus of Web-based English (GloWbE), the Corpus of Historical American (COHA) and the Hansard corpus.
According to the Oxford English Corpus data consulted, while in February 2014 chomp.* at the bit was more frequent than champ.* (414:310), the picture varied by region.
(The .* means all forms of the verb, although 88 per cent are continuous tenses in any case, i.e. with the form champing/chomping.)
In BrE chomp.* was less frequent (97:121) but in U.S. English the opposite was true (201/102). Canadian usage was in line with U.S., while Australian was closer to British (chomp.* 15: champ.* 25).
However, by the time of the April 2018 Monitor Corpus, things had changed for BrE: chomp.* was now commoner (224:179). Whether this is an indication of increasing U.S. influence it is impossible to say. For the U.S., the difference between the two forms had increased (876: 336), but for Australia the difference had stayed almost exactly the same in percentage terms (chomp.* 40: champ.* 68). Overall, the ratio was 2,248:1,171.
The three other data sources consulted are from the Brigham Young University corpora. The Global Corpus of Web-based English (GloWbE), which covers 20 different country varieties of English, showed chomp.* to be more than twice as frequent (377:152) and to be more frequent in every country except Australia. But even there, the gap had narrowed (chomp 24: champ 32).
The NOW corpus showed chomp.* to be about 57 per cent or so commoner than champ, that is, by a smaller margin than the GloWbE data (1415:901). My hunch is that because this material is written by journalists of various kinds, who are more likely to have an idea of what is considered to be correct, they are more likely to ‘correct’ themselves, in contrast to the GloWbE writers, who can be anyone anywhere.
Then, to see what a historical corpus showed, I looked at COHA, which is the largest such corpus available. It showed chomp.* at six occurrences, and first appearing as late as the 1980s, and champ.* at 20 and first appearing in 1880.
Finally, the Hansard corpus, i.e. a corpus of British parliamentary proceedings 1802–2005, produces an intriguing result. A search for verbs preceding the string at the bit produces 49 examples of champ from the 1930s onwards, seven of chafing, and one each of straining and pulling but absolutely none of chomp. Does this mean that the honourable members to a person believe it is the correct and only version? Or could it be that the transcribers have corrected what was said?
Q2: Who decides whether it is ‘wrong’? What do they say?
Short answer:
Well, each of us can (and often does in practice) decide if we think a particular use of a word, phrase, etc., is wrong, but it is generally dictionaries and usage guides that are taken as objective judges of such matters.
The OED, the Oxford Online Dictionary, Collins and Merriam-Webster make no comment about the correctness or otherwise of chomp.
Longer answer:
It is not listed in either the Cambridge Guide to English Usage or the Merriam-Webster Concise Dictionary of English Usage. I added it to my edition of Fowler and noted there that chomp is more frequent than champ in the corpus I consulted at the time and sententiously ended the note with ‘some purists will see it as an egregious mistake, even though it is recorded in dictionaries’.
It is also mentioned in Paul Brians’ Common Errors in English Usage.
The dictionaries consulted deal with it as follows:
Oxford Dictionary Online: just gives the phrase chomp at the bit under chomp.OED: In a 2007 draft addition, notes ‘Chiefly Amer. to chomp at the bit : = to champ at the bit’. In other words, it says it is the equivalent of champ, but refrains from judgement on the phrase itself. However, the whole (1972?) entry for chomp is headed by the rubric formerly dialect and U.S., which could be construed as relegating U.S. English to the status of a dialect (!), though I’m quite sure this is not what the lexicographers meant.Collins: their dictionary for learners, Cobuild, lists chomp at the bit without comment.However, the dictionary for mother-tongue speakers for British English does not list it under chomp, but the dictionary for U.S. English does.Merriam-Webster Unabridged shows both versions without comment.However, the online M-W version cross-refers the relevant meaning of chomp to the entry for the verb champ while specifying that chomp in that meaning is usually in the phrase chomping at the bit. This could either be an example of lexicographers being economical, or a subtle implication that champ is preferable.Q3: What do editors, and others who care and are presumably vocabulary-rich, think?
Who knows?
A simple way would be to ask them whether they would leave it or emend it when editing.
I tried that.
In a tiny survey on Twitter, 9 out of 12 people said they would change it.
17% I’m not U.S. & wld leave
42% I’m not U.S. & wld change
08% I’m U.S. & wld leave it
33% I’m U.S. & wld change it
There is also the poll at the head of this post. Interestingly, it shows that U.S. speakers are almost evenly divided about correcting chomp to champ, whereas British speakers decidedly would change it.
This is an updated version of a previously published post.
