british english - "Knocked up" to mean "woken up"


I'm reading some Sherlock Holmes stories (don't judge - it's good vacation reading) and Conan Doyle has Holmes saying things like "Sorry to knock you up, Watson..." which I'm finding very... odd. From the context I'm gathering that it means "wake up," but my head immediately goes to the modern American meaning of "impregnate."


Is "knock up" ever used with this meaning anymore? And if not, did it disappear around the time that the pregnancy meaning became common, or did it vanish on its own?



Answer



The Google n-grams viewer suggests that the “impregnate” sense became dominant in the US around the 1940’s, but that in British English, other meanings were more common until at least the 1990’s.


This is based on comparing the relative frequencies of knocked her up vs. knocked him up. It seems reasonable to conclude that when the “impregnate” meaning becomes dominant, knocked her up should become much more frequent than knocked him up. The results for this in the “American English” corpus show this shift happening between the ’30s and ’60s, since which time knocked him up has been much less common:


“knocked him up” vs. “knocked her up”, American English, 1800–2000


(The predominance of knocked him up in earlier years presumably just due to the preponderance of male characters in general.) As one would expect, the British English corpus shows a very different pattern, with no such notable switch:


“knocked him up” vs. “knocked her up”, American English, 1800–2000


It looks like knocked her up may have been becoming predominant in British English in the ’90s, but this is such a small interval of the data that I’m not sure how much significance one can attach to it.


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