The words till and until appear in Middle English about 700 years ago. Till came first in Old Norse, where it was combined with und, which meant something like “as far as” or “up to.” Or “till.” One can imagine Old Norse purists decrying the inherent redundancy of the word until, but the interchangeable till and until both worked their way into English.
Today, until is more common than till, which may be thought of incorrectly as an informal shortening. In fact, it’s sometimes mistakenly spelled with a leading apostrophe, as ’till or ’til. There is nothing technically wrong with ’til, except that it’s unnecessary when we already have the word till.
The combination up until may usually be replaced with no loss of meaning by until or till. There are a few cases to be found of further combining to create upuntill. If this ever catches on, maybe we’ll see up upuntill in a few hundred years.
Until played second fiddle to till for hundreds of years. A search of the Google Books corpus shows prevalence of till until the middle of the 19th century in American-published books and the early 20th century in British-published books.
The related verb till is more than 1,000 years old, appearing in Old English in the sense of laboring or striving. We associate it with working the soil, and nonfarming senses as used today are usually derived from the sense of cultivating.
The noun till, meaning the place money is kept in a cash register, is not related. It came to us from a French word in the 16th century.
Header photo via ActionVance, Unsplash.
This article was originally posted on the Copyediting website, March 19, 2015.
