The word until can be a preposition (it took until late that evening to unload the truck, for example) or a conjunction (we kept unloading until it got dark) and for many years I believed the shortened version of this word was ’til.
You know—like ’til is a truncation of until, with the apostrophe indicating that a part of the word is missing, as in a contraction (can not becomes can’t, for example, with the apostrophe standing in for the missing letter).*
So if I were going to sing along with my favorite boy band, I sang,
There were bells on the hill,
but I never heard them ringing,
No, I never heard them at all
’Til there was you … **
That is, until I heard a piece about this very thing on the radio a few years ago. I scribbled down the pertinent line—till is the older word!—and when I was looking for more information later, I found that plenty has been said about it. And I learned that I’d been wrong. (Most of my opinions about such things, you should know, come from the voluminous reading of American novels typeset in the middle decades of the last century.)
Here is an interesting post about it from Motivated Grammar. The writer of this blog, a linguist, thought as I did, until he looked further.
Why would anyone spell it till if it’s coming from until? Well, it turns out that till isn’t derived from until. Till and ’til are actually two different words with two different etymologies. Till is the earlier form, attested as early as 1330; Until is actually derived from till, not the other way around as in ’til (a backformation which showed up much later).
What you can take from this, of course, is both ’til and till are acceptable. I myself tend to use the former in my personal correspondence (old habits, etc.) but since it isn’t even mentioned in my fave dictionary, I’ve started editing to till, which also eliminates the chance that the apostrophe will be turned the wrong way. 🙂
* Interestingly, I had also always thought bate was a truncation of abate and thus should be written as ’bate (as in he waited for the election results with ’bated breath) … but that is not the case either. See what you can learn if you simply ask a question and check the answer?
** Written by Meredith Willson for his 1957 musical play The Music Man.
Tweet: The word until can be a preposition or a conjunction, but there’s more to it than that.
Tweet: Why would anyone spell it TILL if it’s derived from UNTIL?
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