Perhaps and maybe

https://youtu.be/GUVT1NZtZPo


https://youtu.be/fWNaR-rxAic


I wrote "perhaps" in a facebook message to a friend, and then I started wondering, why did I say "perhaps" rather than "maybe"? Why do we have these two synonyms? Does "perhaps" sound old-fashioned and formal?

Half French or Latin (per = "by") and half Viking (hap,  = chance or good fortune, the source of "happy" and "happen"), "perhaps" is a lovely hybrid word showing the mixed-up nature of the history of English.

It was rather late to the party of "possibly" words, turning up in the early 1500s, when several other synonyms -- "peradventure", "percase", "perchance", "mayhap", "haply" -- had already been around for over a hundred years.  But, fortunately for the lyricist of the Doris Day song above (try writing a song with the refrain "peradventure"!), "perhaps" marched steadfastly to dominance from the 1600s onward.

But is it in turn going to be ousted by an upstart, in this case "maybe"?

"Maybe", a smooshed-together version of the phrase "it may be", is in fact older than "perhaps", dating from the 1400s.  The OED has this to say:

Although found in major 17th-cent. writers, the word is not frequent in standard literary English before the mid 19th cent., but becomes frequent in poetic sources in the later 19th cent. It occurs frequently in 19th-cent. novels as a marker of dialectal or colloquial speech, and is labelled in the New English Dictionary (1906) as ‘archaic and dialectal’ and by J. Elphinston Principles of the English Language (1750) as a colloquialism, although it is entered without comment in Johnson and Webster.

How odd to think of "maybe" being considered "archaic and dialectal" just over a century ago. But if you look at the charts below, comparing frequencies over time in the Corpus of Historical American English, you can see how very infrequent it was, at least in writing, in the 19th century. You can see  "perhaps" steadily holding its own, but "maybe" creeps up on it, and then gallops to overtake it at the end of the 20th century, a trend confirmed by the more recent Corpus of Contemporary American English.

The COCA charts also reveal that "maybe" is much more common in spoken English, whereas "perhaps" is more favoured in writing. In fact, one group of writers doesn't want any of your damn "maybe", thank you very much: academics sure don't like it! 

But if the increased overall use of "maybe" continues (and there's no reason to think it won't), "perhaps" will likely begin to sound more and more formal, stuffy, and possibly (eventually) as archaic as "mayhap" or "peradventure". I think it is only a matter of time before "maybe" becomes very dominant.

Besides, "maybe" has a secret weapon: it is the only word in Modern English that rhymes with "baby", thus making it a shoo-in for use in popular songs. "Perhaps", in contrast, has many more rhymes, but here they are:

• collapse
• elapse
• prolapse
• relapse
• synapse
• lapse
• caps
• chaps
• claps
• craps
• flaps
• gaps
• laps
• Lapps
• maps
• naps
• raps
• saps
• scraps
• slaps
• snaps
• straps
• taps
• traps
• wraps
• yaps
• zaps

I can't imagine Carly Rae Jepsen making a hit out of any of those! Not even perchance.

Tell me what you think about "perhaps" and "maybe". Is "perhaps" beginning to sound old-fashioned? Would you ever use "maybe" in formal writing?

Would you like to know more about the history of the English language? If you live in the Greater Toronto area, sign up for my fun course this fall:
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perhaps - COHA
SECTION	FREQ	SIZE (M)	PER MIL
1810	494	1.2	418.22
1820	3,169	6.9	457.47
1830	5,114	13.8	371.26
1840	5,354	16.0	333.62
1850	6,131	16.5	372.22
1860	6,188	17.1	362.83
1870	7,077	18.6	381.26
1880	7,258	20.3	357.26
1890	7,334	20.6	356.00
1900	7,866	22.1	355.97
1910	8,296	22.7	365.45
1920	8,716	25.7	339.76
1930	7,384	24.6	300.13
1940	7,698	24.3	316.17
1950	7,533	24.5	306.91
1960	7,408	24.0	308.96
1970	7,752	23.8	325.51
1980	7,944	25.3	313.79
1990	7,218	27.9	258.33
2000	6,486	29.6	219.36
TOTAL	132,420

maybe - COHA
SECTION	FREQ	SIZE (M)	PER MIL
1810	9	1.2	7.62
1820	37	6.9	5.34
1830	126	13.8	9.15
1840	215	16.0	13.40
1850	163	16.5	9.90
1860	522	17.1	30.61
1870	413	18.6	22.25
1880	513	20.3	25.25
1890	420	20.6	20.39
1900	1,216	22.1	55.03
1910	2,122	22.7	93.48
1920	2,706	25.7	105.48
1930	4,083	24.6	165.96
1940	5,218	24.3	214.31
1950	5,784	24.5	235.65
1960	5,987	24.0	249.70
1970	6,961	23.8	292.29
1980	7,419	25.3	293.06
1990	10,232	27.9	366.19
2000	10,895	29.6	368.48
TOTAL	65,041

perhaps -COCA
SECTION	FREQ	SIZE (M)	PER MIL
SPOKEN	19,368	109.4	177.05
FICTION	27,024	104.9	257.61
MAGAZINE	22,341	110.1	202.90
NEWSPAPER	16,410	106.0	154.86
ACADEMIC	24,558	103.4	237.45
1990-1994	25,302	104.0	243.29
1995-1999	22,118	103.4	213.81
2000-2004	21,542	102.9	209.27
2005-2009	19,197	102.0	188.13
2010-2015	21,542	121.6	177.20
TOTAL	109,701

maybe -COCA
SECTION	FREQ	SIZE (M)	PER MIL
SPOKEN	46,237	109.4	422.67
FICTION	63,619	104.9	606.47
MAGAZINE	17,165	110.1	155.89
NEWSPAPER	16,084	106.0	151.79
ACADEMIC	3,234	103.4	31.27
1990-1994	25,027	104.0	240.65
1995-1999	28,809	103.4	278.49
2000-2004	27,102	102.9	263.28
2005-2009	28,765	102.0	281.90
2010-2015	36,636	121.6	301.36
TOTAL	146,339