differences - Which is preferable: "We are all..." or "We all are..."?




  1. "We are all mad."




  2. "We all are mad."




I think each of these conveys the same idea. Besides this, we can use "we are all" alone. I hear the first one more frequently.


Does the second one sound worse to a native speaker? I wonder about this.


Note: I'm not a native speaker.



Answer



Both are grammatical, but the first is more usual. We are all is much more frequent than we all are in both the Corpus of Contemporary American English and in the British National Corpus. There are, however, some contexts where we all are would be used. The answer to the question Who is responsible? might be We all are, and not We are all.


That apart, as a non-native speaker, you would be wise to stick to We are all when something else follows.


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