970. We answer a listener question about the difference between "addictive" and "addicting," and then we look at how to write compound nouns: did you visit a coffeehouse or a coffee house?
970. We answer a listener question about the difference between "addictive" and "addicting," and then we look at how to write compound nouns: did you visit a coffeehouse or a coffee house?
| Edited transcript with links: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/addictive/transcript
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Grammar Girl here. Today, we're going to talk about the words "addictive" and "addicting," and whether they're interchangeable. Some people say addicting isn't even a word. Are they right?
Before we start, this is Mignon. There was a death in my family a few weeks ago, and I have gotten really behind, so this week's show has two segments from the archives. I went all the way back to 2015 to find two that I really like and that I think many of you won't have heard before. And I still have a new familect at the end. Enjoy the show.
Getting back to our question, an unnamed caller asked this. “My friends and I were having an argument the other day about whether TV watching was appropriate or not. And someone said it was addictive, and another person said it was addicting. And then it broke off into whether the proper word was ‘addictive’ or ‘addicting.’ Could you please explain this whole thing for us?”
Would you feel better if I told you that you and your friends aren't the only ones who are arguing about whether the right word is addictive or addicting? There is actually a raging debate, and there's even one unconfirmed account of a tobacco lobbyist trying to use the uncertainty to influence policy.
If you want to be safe, stick with "Television is addictive." Addictive is an adjective, meaning it describes a noun. Remember Schoolhouse Rock? “He was a scary bear. He was a hairy bear,” and we described him with adjectives. "Hairy," "scary," and "addictive" are adjectives. And Schoolhouse Rock was addictive TV.
Now, there are definitely people who argue that "addicting" isn't a word. They say that "addict" is a noun, not a verb. However, I did the simple thing. I looked it up. And three out of four dictionaries included "addicting." And for those of you who care, the American Heritage Dictionary lists it as a transitive verb, and the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam Webster Unabridged Dictionary list it as an adjective that was first used in 1931 to describe morphine.
Strangely, the main dictionary.com entry lists “non addicting” as an adjective, but not “addicting” itself. A transitive verb is a verb that requires a direct object. An example could be, “Amy was addicting Steve to Scrabble.” Steve is the direct object of the verb “addicting.” He's the receiver of the action.
Addicting is also a participle adjective of the verb “to addict,” just as charming and insulting are the participle adjectives of the verbs “to charm” and “to insult.” I don't think anyone would say you can't describe a person as charming or a statement as insulting. And similarly, it's okay to describe TV as addicting.
A quick tip is that you can usually tell whether a word ending with "ing" is acting like a verb or an adjective by testing whether you can add a modifier, such as “very,” in front of it. If you can't, then it's a verb. If you can, then it's an adjective. In the sentence, “Television is addicting,” it would be fine to add “very” and say, “Television is very addicting.”
So that's your clue that it's an adjective in this case. When it's a verb, as in, “Amy was addicting Steve to Scrabble,” you can't add “very” in front of it. “Amy was very addicting Steve to Scrabble.” That doesn't make sense, so it's a verb. Three big style guides, Fowler's Modern English Usage, Garner's Modern American Usage, and Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, all have entries on the word addicted, but none of them address the use of addicting to mean addictive, leading me to believe that either it's not a common peeve or none of them thinks it's wrong.
I also checked three smaller usage guides and the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook. None of these books addressed the topic either. If it were wrong to use addicting, I would expect to see it addressed in at least one of these books, but it's not. After all this research, I hope you can see that it's fine to say both that “Television is addictive” and that “Television is addicting.”
Addicting is in most dictionaries, it's been used as an adjective for about 80 years, and no style guide says it's wrong. It's not unprecedented for English to have two words that mean the same thing, either. English is redundant that way. Some of you will remember that just a few months ago I did a show about “preventive” and “preventative,” and “orient and orientate.”
Nevertheless, you'll see in the comments on this article, and in the comments on the Merriam Webster dictionary page, despite the evidence, some people feel strongly that you shouldn't use “addicting” to mean “addictive.” If you have a blog and you want to avoid a flame war, stick with “addictive.” “Addictive” is also much more common than “addicting,” so using the word “addictive” is less likely to be distracting to your readers.
My conclusion is that using “addicting” as an adjective isn't wrong, but “addictive” is the safer choice. Finally, I have two other points. First, some people think “addictive” should only be used to refer to negative things. So to them, referring to Scrabble as addictive would be wrong. But in everyday life, it's common to hear positive things referred to as addictive.
Second, physicians who treat pain make an important distinction between patients who are addicted to drugs and patients who have a physical dependence on drugs. When people are physically dependent on drugs, they get pain relief from taking the drugs and have withdrawal symptoms when they stop taking the drugs.
People who are addicted to drugs exhibit behaviors such as hoarding drugs and taking drugs in ways they aren't prescribed or when they don't provide relief from pain. So it isn't correct to say that people are addicted to drugs solely because they experience withdrawal symptoms when they stop taking them.
And that's all I have to say about “addictive” and “addicting.”
Next, I have a piece about types of nouns because a fourth grader named Kaylee sent me this message. Quote, “My writing teacher loves your book and uses it a lot. I'd like for you to explain concrete, compound, abstract, and collective nouns.” Unquote. I remember learning that a noun is a person, place, or thing.
But unfortunately, it's more complicated than that. People, places, and things are all what we call concrete nouns. They're things you can see or touch, such as kittens and puppies, trees and flowers, sticks and stones, and cities and countries. People often find abstract nouns more confusing. They're things such as concepts, feelings, ideas, states of mind, and attributes.
For example, honor, loyalty, courage, truth, and freedom are all abstract nouns. If you have an abstract word like that, and you want to test whether it's really a noun, one way to do it is to see if you can replace the word with one that's more recognizable to you as a noun, a concrete noun. For example, let's say you have the sentence, “I'm out of gumption today.”
If you want to figure out whether “gumption” is a noun, see if you can replace it with a concrete noun. Instead of saying, “I'm out of gumption today,” you can say, “I'm out of milk today.” So you can. You can replace “gumption” with the concrete noun “milk.” So it's a good bet that “gumption” is an abstract noun. Try it with this sentence:
“Don't you have any decency?” Well, is “decency” a noun? Sure, because you can replace it with other nouns. Don't you have any rocks? Don't you have any kittens? Don't you have any trees? You can replace “decency” with concrete nouns, so it's a good bet that “decency” is an abstract noun. It's not something you can see or touch, but it's a noun nonetheless.
Words sometimes serve multiple purposes. So a word such as “hate” can be both an abstract noun and a verb. In this sentence, it's a verb: “I hate fishing” but in this sentence, it's an abstract noun: “Don't bring your hate in here.” No need to get confused though. You can still use the concrete noun test to see when it's a noun.
When you can replace “hate” with a concrete noun, then you know it's playing a role as an abstract noun. Don't bring your dog in here. Don't bring your fish in here. Don't bring your cookies in here. Well, on second thought, the cookies are fine. Bring them on in. But, since you can replace “hate” with the nouns “dog,” “fish,” and “cookies,” “hate” is a noun in the sentence, “Don't bring your hate in here.”
Collective nouns are a type of concrete noun, and that may be why people find all these different categories hard to understand, there's overlap between them. Collective nouns are words that describe a group of things, usually people. For example, “band,” “board,” “class,” “committee,” and “team.” Those are all collective nouns.
In American English, we tend to treat collective nouns as singular. So although there are multiple people in a band or on a team, we treat them as one thing. For example, we'd say, “The band is playing tonight.” “The board is meeting tomorrow.” “The class is doing a project on kittens.” “The committee is planning a coup.”“The team is selling custom made marimbas to raise money.” A particularly fun type of collective noun is what are called nouns of assembly, or terms of venery. These are phrases that typically describe a group of animals, such as a pride of lions, a murder of crows, and so on. But sometimes people also make up funny or clever new ones, such as a blister of shoes, a forest of books, or an agony of dentists.
I just made those up. What are your favorites? Can you make up some? If you can, leave them in the comments. Finally, compound nouns are usually nouns that are made up of two other words, and they can be formed three different ways. Open compounds, closed compounds and hyphenated compounds.
Open compounds are two separate words, such as "coffee house."
Closed compounds are words that used to be separate but are now written as one word, such as "football". And hyphenated compounds are words that are joined by a hyphen, such as "collar" hyphen "bone," "collar-bone." The frustrating thing about compound nouns is that they change over time. Often, they'll start as open or hyphenated compounds and then merge into a single word.
And different dictionaries will list them written in different ways. For example, the huge Oxford English Dictionary has "collar-bone" hyphenated. But Merriam Webster's Online Dictionary and the newer Oxford English Dictionary's site Both have it as a single word. Another example is "treehugger." Collins Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary have it hyphenated, but Merriam Webster's Online Dictionary has it as an open compound.
It's really common to find these differences between compound words in dictionaries. The best thing you can do is to pick one dictionary and say, this is the one I'm going to use as my guide, and just stick with that.
Finally, I have a familect story.
“Hi, Mignon. This is Becky Gallagher from Denver, Colorado, and I've got a familect for you. In my childhood home, there was a huge piece of furniture in the kitchen, one that had drawers and cupboards and even a flower bin. We called it ‘the folley.’ I always spelled that folley, F O L L E Y. ‘The rubber bands are in the folley.’
‘Get the napkins out of the folley.’ ‘Can you get me a glass, a wine glass from the folley?’ I thought that all similar pieces of furniture were called ‘follies.’ I would mention the folley in a friend's house or tell someone their folley was like ours or that it was different than ours. It wasn't until I was in my early 20s that I heard the story.
My recently married parents took a trip to upstate Maine when my dad was in grad school. My mom went to an estate sale and saw this amazing hutch and bought it for 75 dollars. They lived in Oregon at the time. It cost more to package and ship this hutch by train than it did to buy it in the first place. The first folley of their marriage. And it has kept this name, ‘folley,’ ever since, 57 years strong. Every hutch is a folley to my family.
A strange little tidbit, interestingly enough, in architecture, a folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration but suggesting through its appearance some other purpose or of such extravagant appearance that it transcends the range of usual garden buildings.
Very much the folly in my family's kitchen. Thanks. Love listening to Grammar Girl. Bye.”
Thank you, Becky. What a wonderful story. It made me laugh, and it was touching too. That's a lot of years of folly.
If you want to share the story of your familect, your family dialect, a word your family and only your family uses, call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL. It’s in the show notes, and be sure to tell me the story behind your familect because that’s always the best part.
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Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to audio engineer, Nathan Semes; marketing associate, Davina Tomlin; ad operations specialist, Morgan Christianson; digital operations specialist, Holly Hutchings; director of podcasts, Brannan Goetschius; and marketing assistant, Kamryn Lacey.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.