Great resource and fun place to just spend an hour or so.
The English-to-American dictionary is the work of Chris Rae.
From his website:
As a Scot who has spent some time in the USA on holiday lately, I have discovered a bewildering array of words which are in common use on our side of the pond and invariably mean nothing at all or something exceedingly rude on the other side. I once noted down about fifteen of them and that afternoon formulated them into this dictionary. Since then the dictionary has thrived (well, lived) on contributions from readers and is steadily growing into a decent reference.
The link posted above is for the main page and you can search from there.
To view the entire dictionary as one large web page,
click here.
Four examples:
anorak n. As well as being a waterproof jacket, an anorak is someone who's a little bit too knowledgeable about one subject. Generally a subject like seventeenth century flower pots or steam trains, rather than athletic sexual positions or gunfighting. Americans (and also Brits, as our languages merge ever closer) would call them "geeks". I have a feeling that it's because train-spotters all wear brightly-coloured anoraks, but I've no real basis for thinking that. This is just another example of me foisting my half-thought-out biased views on the general public via the one-way medium of the web. I love this dirty town.
scotch n. Scotch is a contraction of the word "Scottish" but is now only used in the context of foodstuffs, and whisky - we refer to anything else as being "Scottish". So we aren't Scotch people; we are Scottish people. If we were Scotch people, we would be made primarily from whisky. Oh, wait�
sleeping policeman n. This is an odd one. A sleeping policeman is, would you believe, a speed-bump. I sincerely hope that its name is not derived from someone's keenness to flatten members of the constabulary.
table v. To Brits, tabling something means to put it forward for discussion shortly. To Americans, it means to put it aside; leave it for the moment. Not entirely sure how these separated.
I used to live in Boston and one place I lived in had two Doctors from England living next door. They (husband and wife) were over here for a few years and in order to practice, they had to take several examinations, one of which was an English Proficiency exam.
Their comment were quite specific: "...and they dare to call it English"
As Winston Churchill said:
"England and the United States are two nations divided by a common language."
J.