Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by drcongo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

drcongo

What's the "quite" difference?

View on HN

Roughly:

British "quite" means somewhat.

American "quite" means very.

A Brit saying a suggestion is "quite good" is actually saying it's not good enough, whereas a US listener will think they've been told the opposite.

Good lord. I just three finger tapped on the word quite to see what the macOS dictionary says - "to the utmost or most absolute extent or degree; absolutely; completely", although it does offer a second definition "to a certain or fairly significant extent or degree; fairly: it's quite warm outside".

For context, I'm British though I have spent a fair amount of time in the states over the years and somehow never picked up this difference.

This is interesting because I assume it has suffered the same linguistic degradation as the word "fine" which in some cases means "of the highest quality" but mostly means "meh". I suspect it comes down to the dialect and social rank of the person saying the sentence. Compare how you would perceive:

    "You did a fine job"

    "It is quite impossible"

depending on who was saying it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com