ic-icalword-choice
I just read something where a phrase was described as ironical. To me the word ironical jars terribly. It just doesn't sound right at all. I would have said ironic.
Is ironical a feature of American English, or am I just missing something? Where would you use it over ironic?
The Linguist List thread that @cori linked to has a couple discussions of what’s going on here. For example, one commenter says:
couple is coming into the English list of indefinite numbers, just below few. … If couple with this meaning is new in the language, I suspect that it is picking up the grammar of the semantically adjacent word few.
I did a search in the Corpus of Historical American English for A COUPLE OF [N*] and for A COUPLE [N*], to search for incidences of these two idioms ([N*] means some kind of noun).
From these results, we see that A COUPLE OF is much more common than A COUPLE, although it should be noted that there are incidences of A COUPLE [N*] dating all the way back to 1820 in the corpus. Interestingly, both terms have been on the rise throughout the twentieth century, and the ratio between them has been decreasing, meaning that A COUPLE [N*] is becoming relatively more common.
is it "principal definition" or "first definition" or "main definition?" "
Best Answer
The Corpus of Contemporary American English shows 4253 occurrences of “ironic” and 134 occurrences of “ironical”, that is 32 to 1. The British National Corpus shows 703 and 88, respectively, that is 8 to 1. These results support the feeling that “ironical” is less common than “ironic,” but they do not suggest that the word “ironical” is a feature of American English.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) does not state any regional preference of the word “ironic” or “ironical” (the links require subscription). Interestingly, the definition of “ironic” in the OED is just:
and detailed definitions are given for “ironical.”