quite pretty, rather pretty, very pretty in British English and American English


I have a feeling that "quite pretty" doesn't have exactly the same meaning in British English and American English. For instance, in American English, "She's quite pretty" is considered as a compliment, and is close in meaning with "She's very pretty", whereas in British English, "She's quite pretty" has more or less the meaning of "She's rather pretty", "She's okay", but not "very pretty", which means that "quite pretty" is not "quite a compliment" in British English. What do British and American native speakers think? What would an Austalian or a Canadian think?




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

word choice - Which is the correct spelling: “fairy” or “faerie”?