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Comment by yesenadam | Hacker News Reader

> This is my garden, and I intend to putter.

I was about about to correct that use of "putter" as a typo, but it seems it's a USAism. Never seen that before. I'd always thought machines/engines putter, gardeners potter. I put it to the super-accurate Purported Google Results Test:

putter in my garden - 7 million

potter in my garden - 142 million

putter around - 9 million

potter around - 363 million

putter about - 49 million

potter about - 581 million

Although when I put on a USA accent, there's not very much difference between my "potter" and "putter", maybe that's something to do with "putter" apparently being the US spelling.

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The writer is from South Africa, as mentioned in the post. "Putter about" is definitely not a USAism, it's an English expression used throughout the anglophone world that can be spelled "putter" or "potter," meaning the same thing. I've only heard it pronounced "putter" personally. The stats are interesting!

Yeah you're right. "Puttering about", with that sense of a machine chugging along, seems a different thing to pottering. Pottering in a garden seems more like patiently tinkering with something than continually moving from place to place.

"putter" or "potter," meaning the same thing.

I don't think they mean the same in British English. My motorboat "putters about the lake" while I "potter about in my garden". But I could be wrong.

I would have assumed "putter" (in this sense) is onomatopoeic, from the sound of a small engine running slowly.

"Potter", OTOH, comes from a word for poking or prodding at the ground (hence appropriate for gardening).

(I suppose with the right kind of ride-on mower, it's possible to "putter about the garden" with appropriate sound effects!)

Checking OED citations, though, it seems the "putter" form (as a variant of "potter", distinct from the sound of an engine "puttering") does have a similar history (both go back to the 1820s).

Still, I'd agree that "potter about the garden" is by far the more common usage.

Ha, glad I'm not the only one, I went directly to Wiktionary after finishing the article, which doesn't mark it 'chiefly US' or anything, and gives RP IPA.

Which contains another surprise, for me anyway - it's not pronounced like the golf club, but starting like 'put' (that over there) or 'foot'.

Apple's Dictionary.app, which for me pulls from the New Oxford American Dictionary, does mention that potter is the British version:

> put·ter³ | ˈpədər | (British potter) > verb [no object] North American > occupy oneself in a desultory but pleasant manner, doing a number of small tasks or not concentrating on anything particular: early morning is the best time of the day to putter around in the garden. > • [with adverbial of direction] move or go in a casual, unhurried way: the duck putters on the surface of the pond.

and defines potter as:

> verb British > another term for putter³.

(It also has all 3 definitions of putter - golf, engine, gardening - pronounced the same way: ˈpədər)

Thanks. Hehe that's amusingly parochial. ("Whole World except USA" they like to call "British", and 'potter' is merely 'another term for putter'. Everything is inside-out.)

I'm from the U.S. and the phrases "potter around" and "potter in the garden" are new to me. I have always used "putter".

My pronunciation of putter is "puh-ter" (same sound as under) and potter is "pah-ter" (same sound as father).

This is me for a sec every time I see UK collective plural nouns, for example, 'Apple have 10k employees'. Actually now that I think about it, people from Britain must feel like something's off even MORE often from this difference than americans, seeing as lots of content online is US english.

Before today, I’d only ever heard ‘putter’ used to refer to the golf club you use for ‘putting’...

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