Spring, summer, and winter are largely known by the same words among most English speakers. But the same can’t be said for the season when leaves change color and temperatures begin to drop. Some call it “fall,” some call it “autumn,” and others are too sad about the fact that summer is over to care about the phrasing.
In practice, Americans tend to use “fall” more often, while Brits prefer “autumn.” But no matter your personal preference, the two terms effectively mean the exact same thing. Let’s examine how each one originated, and why people on each side of the pond prefer one over the other.
The word “harvest,” which is derived from the Old English hærfest, predated both “autumn” and “fall.” According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “harvest” was used among Middle English speakers in the mid-13th century, but there was some confusion in this word’s multiple meanings.
“Harvest” not only described the intermediary season following summer, but also referenced the time of the year when crops were harvested. While these periods do overlap to some degree, they don’t precisely align. The English language needed a word that could help distinguish the general season from the actual harvest — thus the word “autumn” was born.
“Autumn” is derived from the Latin autumnus, which comes from augere, meaning “to increase.” Autumnus was adopted by Old French speakers as autumpne sometime in the 13th century and later made its way to Middle English by the late 14th century. It wasn’t until the 16th century, however, that the spelling was changed to “autumn.” This quickly became popular in England as the predominant term for the transitional season between summer and winter.
As noted by Merriam-Webster, the word “autumn” didn’t paint enough of a picture for writers who were seeking something with a bit more flourish. Thus, “fall of the leaf” made its way into many literary works by the 1540s. This poetic phrase described the literal falling of leaves and gave rise to the shorthand term “fall” by the 1660s.
From the get-go, “fall” was used as a synonym for “autumn”; however, it was more of a colloquial term in the seasonal sense. “Fall,” as a noun for the season, didn’t appear in an official dictionary until 1755, when it was included in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language.
As British settlers made their way to the Americas, they brought with them their customs, their traditions, and of course, their language. But in part due to the geographic separation between Europe and the New World, American English began to quickly diverge from British English. By the middle of the 1800s, “fall” was one of the terms that marked an American English speaker from a British English speaker.
Exactly why Americans trended toward “fall” is a somewhat unanswerable question. It’s entirely possible that it was part of a larger trend to distinguish American English from the dialect of their former oppressors. British people had considered “autumn” to be the official term, and so Americans may have embraced “fall” as a way to stand out and make that word their own.
We do know that both “autumn” and “fall” originated in Britain, and the words are now used in an identical manner to one another. That being said, “fall” is much less common in Britain than “autumn” is in America, where the words are more often used interchangeably.
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