Interest(s)
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Below is a guest post by Bob Ladd:
A few days ago I received an editorial decision letter from a journal, which included a request to deal with a few typos. I had begun a sentence with the phrase “In the interests of brevity,” and the editor wanted me to remove the final -s from the word “interests”. Since I know that the editor is not a native speaker of English, my first reaction was to ignore the request, but I thought I should back up my insistence that this was not a typo with some sort of evidence, so I searched for the phrases “in the interests of” and “in the interest of” on Google n-grams. To my surprise, I discovered that both versions of the expression occur, with a roughly 60:40 preference for the version with “interest”, and that this proportion has been roughly stable since the early 20th century. Since Google’s book corpus permits the user to distinguish British and American English, I could also see that the version with “interests” is more common in BrEng and the version with “interest” in AmEng, but that both versions occur in both varieties.
Curious, I searched all the documents on my laptop for both versions. The expression turned up 11 times in things I had written (in phrases like “in the interests of a timely review” and “in the interests of experimental control”) and in every case I used the form with “interests”. In documents written by others (mostly papers and editorial reviews), the expression occurred 14 times, 12 with “interest” and two with “interests”; the contexts were similar to the ones in my own writing (e.g. “in the interest of brevity” and “in the interest of minimizing free parameters”). There were two occurrences of the phrase “in the interest(s) of full disclosure” in pieces written by others, with one exemplar of each version.
It seems odd that no social or indexical significance is attached to the choice between the two variants. All of the instances on my laptop are in formal academic writing, yet even in the same phrase about full disclosure, both versions occur. I have never seen this difference cited as an example of British/American variation, and nor do I know of any prescriptive grumbling about people using the wrong version. In fact, until I received the editorial review last week, I was completely unaware of the existence of this variation. The consistency in my own writing suggests that individual speakers may settle on one form or the other and use it exclusively, but that the choice is essentially random.
Since modern sociolinguistics has made clear that much variation is meaningful, this conclusion is vaguely troubling. Only one observation from Google n-grams suggests something other than randomness: there is a striking diachronic difference that suggests that the choice between the two versions may once have meant something. Over the two centuries of the Google Books corpus, AmEng consistently prefers the version with “interest” in a ratio of about 3:1, while in BrEng there was a marked shift in the second half of the 19th century: over the course of 50 years or so British usage swung from 3:1 in favour of “interest” (as in AmEng) to 3:1 in favour of “interests”. The new British preference for “interests” then remains consistent through the 20th century, and this is what averages out to the 60:40 proportion in 20th century English as a whole. Could there have been a social motivation for the change in British usage?
Above is a guest post by Bob Ladd.
Allen W. Thrasher said,
August 6, 2025 @ 3:38 pm
Could it have something to do with the British tendency to treat corporate bodies, such as Parliament as plural, “they,” where Americans would treat them as singular, for instance the Senate as “it.”
Or could the Brits or some of them have decided to find something more about which they could distinguish themselves from the Yanks and think the Yanks were inferior and just wrong?
Apologies for changing the subject, but in the third paragraph Bob Ladd uses “and nor.” I find this quite unusual. I would use or expect in the context either a bare “nor” or “and neither.” I’m way behind on business work on the computer so don’t have time to check Google, but others may find this interesting.
Mark Liberman said,
August 6, 2025 @ 3:48 pm
COCA has 2624 instances of "in the interest", vs. 1026 instances of "in the interests", which is roughly what Bob found.
However, checking the British Hansard corpus by decades gives a picture that's qualitatively similar to what he found, but quantitatively different:
Bob Ladd said,
August 6, 2025 @ 4:32 pm
@Allen W. Thrasher:
I find it hard to see a connection with the use of plural verbs with subjects like "the government", but your second explanation for the shift is roughly what I had in mind as a "social motivation".
As for your other comment, I'm pretty sure that "and nor" is more common in BrEng than in AmEng, and I'm fairly certain I started using after I moved to the UK. But Google n-grams suggests that its usage has increased in both varieties, roughly in parallel, from a starting point of "very rare" before about 1940.
@MYL – Thanks for checking Hansard – it certainly does suggest that there really was a change in BrEng in the late 19th century, but it makes it no more obvious why the change would have occurred.
Yves Rehbein said,
August 6, 2025 @ 4:40 pm
I would gamble that t is mistakenly inserted in in'eres[s], which is ambiguous to plural. Blame it on the shift to radio over reading in time with the sharp increase in the early 20th century. The beginning up-tick in the 19th century is less significant. I would rather blame it on AmE to antedate the evidence by a century or more being obscured in the corpus due to prudent editors.
I concure with that an indexing plural referent is one likely avenue for the change.
JPL said,
August 6, 2025 @ 5:05 pm
"It seems odd that no social or indexical significance is attached to the choice between the two variants. […] Since modern sociolinguistics has made clear that much variation is meaningful, this conclusion is vaguely troubling."
So what does it mean? (Since the phrase seems to have the status of an idiom.) Or, if you suspect that there is a difference between the two variants in what they mean, what might be the distinction indicated? (If it is an idiom, the lack of distinction might be vaguely less troubling.) (But I'm still interested in the way the first question is answered.)
J.W. Brewer said,
August 6, 2025 @ 6:12 pm
I am I suppose the mirror image of Bob Ladd insofar as I use the singular version and had no idea until reading this post that there was any significant use of the plural version, esp. when the object of "of" is an abstraction like "brevity" or "transparency." Something like "in the interests of Wall Street" is perhaps a bit different and not really the same idiom.
Mark Liberman said,
August 6, 2025 @ 7:14 pm
The evolution over time in the Corpus of Historical American English is rather different from the British Hansard — and also oddly different from the numbers in COCA (2624 instances of "in the interest", vs. 1026 instances of "in the interests", covering 1990-2019):
David L said,
August 6, 2025 @ 8:23 pm
I'm with JWB on this one — I use the singular and find the plural distinctly odd. FWIW, I'm originally British but have been in the US for 40+ years, so I can no longer tell from which side of the Atlantic my instincts derive.
Mark Liberman said,
August 6, 2025 @ 8:28 pm
@Yves Rehbein: "I would gamble that t is mistakenly inserted in in'eres[s], which is ambiguous to plural."
Indeed. See "On beyond the (International Phonetic) Alphabet", 4/19/2018, for an explanation of why /sts/ and /st/ and /s/ can be phonetically ambiguous. I've verified that this applies to interests / interest and will provide details in another post before long.
That doesn't explain the changes over time or the transatlantic differences, though maybe those are just copy-editor fashions?
Arthur Baker said,
August 7, 2025 @ 12:03 am
@Mark Liberman and @Yves Rehbein: In Sydney Australia we have a rare instance of /stst/ which is often heard on radio, TV and in casual conversation. It's the name of a rugby league team, Wests Tigers, formed in 1999 by combining two existing neighbouring teams (Balmain Tigers and Western Suburbs Magpies). It has often occurred to me that the instigators of this merger must have spent little or no time considering the potential pronunciation difficulty, and therefore could hardly have contrived a worse combination. Who'd be a newsreader?
Bob Ladd said,
August 7, 2025 @ 12:05 am
@JPL: I wasn't talking about a difference in meaning between the two variants – I agree that this is something like a single idiom with two different forms (though J W Brewer's suggestion that "in the interests of Wall Street" is different seems plausible). Rather, I was looking for the kinds of "meaning" documented by variationist sociolinguistics since Labov first showed in the 1960s that differing social attitudes among natives of Martha's Vineyard were reflected in (or at least correlated with) their pronunciation of the vowel phonemes in "house" and "right". As suggested by Allen W Thrasher, using one form instead of the other might simply be a way of telling the world "I am British and I speak correctly, unlike those Americans". It's the apparent absence of any such nuance that I was puzzled by.
Bob Ladd said,
August 7, 2025 @ 12:18 am
@J W Brewer, @David L
Your reactions exactly parallel my initial reactions to the editor's request to remove the final S in "interests" – sort of "Huh? What's to correct? This is just the way you say it!" Like JWB, "I had no idea until reading [the editorial letter] that there was any significant use of the [singular] version." The strength of this reaction is surprising if there's no significance to the difference.
BTW, exactly the opposite of David L, I'm originally American and have lived in the UK for about 40 years and can no longer always be sure where my intuitions about these things come from.
Bob Ladd said,
August 7, 2025 @ 1:06 am
Finally (for now), Yves Rehbein and MYL are surely right that "in the interest(s) of" is often going to be pronounced in a phonetically fairly ambiguous fashion, regardless of which version the speaker thinks they're saying. (I look forward to Mark's further post on this point.) This offers an explanation for what's going on here: it suggests that the difference between the two versions arises from the same processes that give rise to eggcorns (acorn/eggcorn, all intents and purposes/all intensive purposes, dog-eat-dog world/doggy-dog world, etc.). In this case, though, unlike with classic eggcorns, it's almost impossible to say which version is "correct" (or, more neutrally, which version is the original version). Nevertheless, the strong reactions to encountering the "wrong" version – i.e. reactions to the other version than the one an individual speaker has internalized, which are illustrated above by J W Brewer, David L, and myself – are very much like the reactions elicited by eggcorns.
Andreas Johansson said,
August 7, 2025 @ 2:02 am
Hm. I have no intuition at all which version is the "right" one, and I suspect I've used both at different times.
Google has done something funny with the gmail search, frustrating my attempts to find some data about what I actually use, but did find an old discussion about the phrase "the interests of science" in a story – I realize now, but nobody seems to have noticed it at the time, that while the original author (a born and bred American) used the plural form, some people used the singular one with no possible difference in intended meaning.
FWIW, I used the plural, but it doesn't necessarily mean anything as I may simply have been echoing the original from.
(The discussion was about whether it made story-internal sense that the character would use the expression, not its grammatical form.)
JPL said,
August 7, 2025 @ 2:11 am
@Bob Ladd:
Quite right. Thanks for the clarification.
But I'm still interested in the first question ("what does it (the idiom) mean?"), if anyone can answer it. (I'm interested in how it would be answered.) (BTW, another possible significance of "-s/0" (not social) within the meaning of the idiom would be "generic/specific".)
edith said,
August 7, 2025 @ 4:03 am
"In the best interests of" vs "in the best interest of"
Is much closer to being used equally.
Adrian Midgley said,
August 7, 2025 @ 4:23 am
Does brevity have interests, and has it declared them?
"Briefly" or "for brevity ". Or "for".
Mark Liberman said,
August 7, 2025 @ 4:24 am
@edith: ""In the best interests of" vs "in the best interest of" Is much closer to being used equally.":
True, at least for current American English — COCA has 722 for "in the best interests of" vs. 1025 for "in the best interest of".
ajay said,
August 7, 2025 @ 4:38 am
Could it have something to do with the British tendency to treat corporate bodies, such as Parliament as plural, “they,” where Americans would treat them as singular, for instance the Senate as “it.”
I'm not sure this is true. Newspaper style guides in the UK always make clear that companies and other corporate bodies are singular, even when the name is plural – so it's "Lehman Brothers has collapsed" and "Marks & Spencer is doing well". The only exception is sports teams, which are plural in the sports pages – "Liverpool have lost again" – but not in the business pages – "Man United faces bankruptcy".
And I think the style guides represent usage accurately. Ngrams shows far more AmE mentions for Senate and Congress as singular, and also far more BrE mentions for Parliament as singular – and a lot of the plural occurrences of "Parliament are/have" may well be "five members of Parliament have"
ajay said,
August 7, 2025 @ 4:49 am
So what does it mean? (Since the phrase seems to have the status of an idiom.)
The idiom comes from a less-used but not obsolete meaning of the word "interest". Mostly when we use "interest" today we mean either a desire to pay attention to something, or a fee for lending money. If I have an interest in frogs, it means I like watching frogs and learning about frogs. A high-interest loan involves me paying you a large fee for lending me money.
But the other (and obviously related) meaning of the word "interest" is a potential financial or other benefit. As in, for example, the British Parliament's Register of Members' Interests. This is not a big book that says "Keir Starmer MP really likes mediaeval history and cricket, and is utterly fascinated by acid house music" – it is a big book that says "Robert Block MP is a director of Westmoor Orchards Ltd and a part-owner of the Slaughtered Lamb pub in Godstow".
(And in fact the word "investment" has also started to cross the same boundary; I might say I'm not really invested in this film, meaning that I don't care what happens; I have in fact lost interest.)
So my interests, in this sense, are those things that potentially bring me profit.- If something's in my interests – if it is on the list of my interests – then it will bring me profit. It's in my interests to promote hat-wearing because I happen to own the third-largest hatter in Wiltshire.
Bob Ladd said,
August 7, 2025 @ 6:17 am
@ajay: Thanks for the detailed account of the meaning of "interest", which is somehow present in the idiom (or whatever it is) under discussion, though only tenuously and metaphorically. A possible alternative to "in the interest(s) of" is "for the sake of", which could easily be substituted in many of the contexts I found in my trawl through my laptop (e.g. "for the sake of brevity", "for the sake of full disclosure", "for the sake of completeness", "for the sake of experimental control", "for the sake of coherent exposition", and so on). A few cases sound better with "interest(s)" than with "sake" (e.g. "in the interest of limiting the duration of the experiment" or "in the interests of sticking more closely to the word limit"). Also, as soon as the "object" of the phrase is a person or a human institution, the meaning gets less metaphorical and more literally about interests in the sense you discuss, e.g. "in the interests of the language as a whole" or "in the interests of the applicant".
Google n-gram says "for the sake of" is more common than "in the interest(s) of".
Mark Liberman said,
August 7, 2025 @ 8:47 am
Breaking up the COCA counts by time period, we see a modest secular trend:
And if we break them up by source, the differences suggest that (at least in recent decades in the U.S.) the version with singular "interest" is more formal:
languagehat said,
August 7, 2025 @ 9:19 am
Like Bob Ladd, J W Brewer, and David L, I was taken aback by the editor's request to remove the final S in "interests" – if I had run across “In the interests of brevity” back when I was still a professional copyeditor (I retired a few years ago), I would have unhesitatingly changed it to “In the interest of brevity.” Interesting!