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Folks,Could you tell me how to distinguish between 'till' and 'until'?Thanks

MrPedantic · Accepted Answer

Hello Blue

1. I won't know until Thursday.

2. I won't know till Thursday.

3. I won't know until DrQ arrives.

4. I won't know till DrQ arrives.

In #1 and #2, till/until is a preposition (it takes a noun as its object). In #3 and #4, it's a conjunction (it introduces a clause).

I don't find any difference in terms of meaning. However, to many native speakers, "till" sounds "informal". So "until" tends to be more common in formal texts.

Moreover, it's slightly more common to use "until" when the subordinate clause precedes the main clause, e.g.

5. Until DrQ arrived, we had no idea how serious the situation was.

There are also some phrases where one form predominates, e.g. "till we meet again", "till death do us part", etc.

MrP

YoHf · Answer

You can use till and until interchangeably in both writing and speech, though as the first word in a sentence until is more common: Until you get that paper written, don’t even think about going to the movies.
If you’ve always thought that till is a shortened form of until, stop. As prepositions meaning “up to,” both words appeared around 1200; the conjunction till is about 70 years older, with until not being used in this way until 1300. Till itself comes from a very old Old English word til, “to.” Until was formed from till by the addition of the prefix un-, which meant “up to.” So etymologically at least, until is a self-contained redundancy, meaning “up to up to.”
The mistaken impression that till is a clipped form also has a few gray hairs. People started spelling it with an apostrophe in the 18th century, indicating they believed it to be a shortened form of until. Although ’till is now nonstandard, ’til is sometimes used in this way. It is a modern invention, dating from 1939, and is considered acceptable. But why bother with apostrophes when you can do without? Courtesy of http://www.bartleby.com/64/C003/0284.html You may as well have a look here for further pieces of information: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/Punctuation/Till.htm Hope this helps, - YoHf [8] Edit: Sorry MrP, I was still writing mine when you posted yours.

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