all _____ sudden

Yes, "all of a sudden" is the usual form.
http://linkwithreality.com/blog/blog/archives/25.html

"all the sudden" is used by Northerners in the Uk. they ofen miss word such as "the" in sentences. the french do the same missing parts of words out. this helps them run together in a sentence and is just easier to say. laziness is the key!

I've never heard the phrase "all the sudden", it must be regional.

I'm from New York. I have travelled, well, not extensively, but at least moderately, within the US and the world. I am familiar with "all of a sudden", but have never heard "all the sudden" or "all of the sudden". I have never even heard of it until this post. On the other hand, I have heard the expression "all the rage" describing some latest fad or fashion.

I think that "all the sudden" is, like "irregardless", a splice error ("all the time" + "all of a sudden")

I am with all of the correct people. Idioms are idioms, are idioms. "Know what I mean?", to coin the phrase of a great scholar, (Ernest).

Let's just have fun with language and communication.

Ghoti, regarding "...when there are real abominations out there, like 'I could care less.'"

That particular expression never bothered me at all. I've even said it on occasion. I've always understood it to be INTENTIONALLY stating the opposite of "I couldn't care less", in a sardonic manner. It isn't bad grammar. It's just SARCASM.

Hi Hutch

I beg to differ: articles can more than only nouns...

They can precede adjectives: "which do you want, sour or sweet?" "I'll take *the sour*"

They can precede participles: "We will all sing when *the dancing* begins."

At any rate, "all of a sudden" and "all of the sudden" (unlike "all the sudden") are syntagmatically identical. The paradigmatic difference between the two is probably representative of variation in language ideology. Why some speakers would choose the definite article while others would choose the indefinite is a neat question.

appologies: articles can PRECEDE more than only nouns...

AO:

"They can precede participles: 'We will all sing when *the dancing* begins.'"

"dancing" is not a participle, but a gerund; thus, "the" still describes a noun.

Also,
"They can precede adjectives: "which do you want, sour or sweet?" "I'll take *the sour*""

I may be wrong, but I would consider that an incorrect statement. As in, it should properly be "I'll take the sour one," and "the" would still be describing a noun.

Regarding "all of a sudden" vs. "all the sudden"..

If you say "all the sudden", doesn't it sound like you're referring to a specific sudden?
"All of THE sudden- the sudden from two minutes ago."
(a ridiculous sentence, but hopefully you know what I mean).
Seeing as you don't usually go around referring to suddens, shouldn't you say "all of a sudden"?

I'm a 7th grade English teacher outside of Rochester, NY. I'm on this site because about half of my students write "all of the sudden" or "all the sudden," and it seemed wrong to me. Many in our area--kids and adults--use these alternate versions in conversation as well. I know I recently heard a network news anchor or reporter use "all the sudden," as well. As I say, it doesn't seem correct, but as many others have pointed out here, the language changes because people change it. I've given up on teaching that "a lot" is two words, and I presume "alot" will be in the dictionary before I'm through (if it isn't already).

I found this thread because I am editing some text and the author wrote "...all of a sudden..." and it sounded funny / odd to me. I say "All of the sudden..."

I started out reading intently, but alas this is a long thread and I must continue editing. I will leave it the way he wrote it...I guess this is the proper form anyway. :-)

Here's another one that drive me nuts: "a couple... " in lieu of "a couple of...". "A couple drinks", or whatever. While I find the question of "all of a sudden" vs "all of the" merely interesting, with this one I am inclined to assume laziness. Any thoughts?

Thank you all for the enlightenment. It saved me from sticking my foot in my mouth. I'm over here as an English instructor at Mao's old school and I like to present myself as an authority on American expressions. So when I saw an abbreviation on a teacher's blackboard tonight, AOTS, defined as "all of the sudden" I considered correcting yet another Chinglish phrase. I missed the chance and decided to check it out online. I just want you to know that they're teaching it as an abbreviation here in Changsha for chat. Others popular in texts in China are sb (somebody) and sth (something), which took me a while to get used to. Prescriptively, Chinese English tends to be a mixture of British and American English in general , maybe a bit more British.

I have lived in Ohio, then Texas, then Colorado, then California. And, as far as I can remember, I have always heard and used the phrase "All of the sudden". The phrase "all of a sudden" simply sounds "wrong" to me -- in the same way some people say "aunt" while pronouncing the "u", or say "PEE-can" instead of "peh-CAHN".

Interesting experiment -- I checked on Google, and found:

"All of a sudden" - 2.5 million hits
"All of the sudden" - 750,000 hits.
"All the sudden" - 340,000 hits.

Under Google News, there are 6900, 660, and 350 hits respectively.

And on Blogsearch, there are 350,000, 39,000 and 17,000 hits respectively.

What's also interesting is that, at least for the first page of search results, nearly all of the google listings for "all of the sudden" are explaining why it is incorrect. I'm not saying it is or isn't, but that does seem to be many others' take on it.

I have a co-worker who says "all the suddenly". How does that rate in your discussion?

Yes, the only thing worse than "all the sudden" is "all the suddenly". But then that's just silly. I can't STAND "all the sudden". It's disgusting.

Not the definite article, it's the indefinite article!

In the battle of the two phrases, "all of a sudden" wins out. "All of the sudden" makes no more sense than if someone were to say "one at the time" instead of "one at a time." Just because people use it colloquially doesn't make it grammatically correct. Bad logic.

All of a sudden - "sudden" is the action. Needs no follow-up.

All of the sudden - by itself doens't hold up. One is left hanging. In order to make a grammatical sentence out of it you'd need to add to it.

for example: All of the sudden movements scared the birds away.

The only people who try to justify the use of "all of the sudden" or "all the sudden" are those who've been using the phrase incorrectly.

Saying it "makes no sense" has nothing to do with it. Presumably it's a phrase that is understood and that goes unremarked by many English speakers. Therefore, it is a normal grammatical usage for those speakers. It's a slight variation. But variation does not equal bad, or ungrammatical, or indeed anything but variation.

What Jim should say in his third sentence is "Just because people use it colloquially doesn't make it part of standard written English."

When Jim says that "sudden" is the action in "all of a sudden", what does he mean? The only way it's different from "all of the sudden" is that the former has the determiner "a" and the latter has the determiner "the". In both cases they function as modifiers. With either one you need a clause in order to have a sentence.

There is nothing more pompous than mentioning your "education" in a response here, especially when "SUDDENLY" is the only correct form.

"All the sudden" and "all of a sudden" are equally ignorant.

Isn't it amusing to hear the things that push people's buttons? I'm 50 and from South Louisiana (in TX for the last 20 years) and for my entire life I have only heard, read, and said "all of a sudden." Inexplicably, over the last few months I'm hearing "all the sudden" exclusively. Like another poster, at first I thought I was mis-hearing it, but the final straw was a newscaster this morning who clearly said "all the sudden," prompting me to find this site. I loved all the comments, and particularly relate to StewDog, Kirby, Matthew (thanks for the statistics), and Finally.
With age comes--if not wisdom, at least tolerance. A few years ago I would have indignantly ranted in support of "all of a sudden," but now I will just join with StewDog and Candace and accept that just because one has heard it one way all his life, and will believe his way is the correct one, it's not worth the effort to try to change others' convictions. After reading all the posts, maybe now I won't grit my teeth so hard now when I hear "all the sudden."

I couldn't disagree more with with the idea that "all the sudden" is a result of laziness. I found the use of this adjective so inappropriate that I had to write something. We have to take into account the context of the speaker abnd measure how important would be to say "all of a sudden". We cannot categorically deny the expression "all the sudden", for somenone, somewhere, heard it! Ok, some of you have never heard of it (I am myself included in this group) and some of you have. We can state that it is wrong but only according to specific circumstances in which we should use "all of a sudden", but it does not change anything. You cannot deny its use and you cannot judge it as the result of laziness. How can we be sure that in the future people will not be saying something even more weird to our "grammatically correct" ears?

Someone mentioned that
"the oldest version of the phrase is 'upon the soden' from 1558..." This argument represents a more scientific approach, evidence of tangible roots that no one has disputed.

The phrases "on the double" and "on the fly" seem related to the 1588 version and semantically related in modern usage to "all the sudden."

He left all the sudden.
?He left all of a/the sudden.
*He left all of a/the double.
*He left all of a/the fly.

?He left on the sudden [side of time/space continuum], without notice.

He left on the double.
He left on the fly.
He was making money on the sly.

That "all" exists instead of "on/upon" might be to amplify suddenness in the same way as "he got up all sudden-like", a phrase that sounds colloquial and might invoke the wrath of prescriptivists.

At least, that's what I fink.

I have also noticed this corruption of the familiar expression creeping into people's spoken English over the past few years and wondered where it came from. And now . . . here it is in print, in today's New York Times! On page 1 of the Week in Review section, in an article on economics by Peter Goodman. What are we coming to?!

All of a sudden, I think everyone here has way too much time on their hands!

I'm originally from Ohio (midwest) and have also lived on the East Coast, the West Coast, and have now been in Texas for 20 years.

I've always heard and used "all of a sudden"; in fact, it wasn't until about a year ago that I first saw "all the sudden" and it bugged.

I saw it in an online posting, though, so I can't tell you where the user was from.

Let's get something straight here: language norms always reflect language usage, not the other way around; this means they are always changing. Even established, more-or-less logical grammatical forms change, albeit at a glacial pace. In the case of idioms such as this, which make no real sense in the first place, the rules can change faster.

That being said, the current STANDARD (i.e. non-dialectic) usage in this case in most of the English-speaking world is indeed 'all of a sudden'; however, I have enough respect for the massive diversity of the English language to argue against the position that it is categorically uneducated to say 'the' instead of 'a'.

There is an undercurrent of cultural stratification at work here that is really interesting, especially in the American context, where concepts of social equality--however mythical--hold a lot of water. Where I live (France), the language is so stratified that one can identify lesser-educated people in a few sentences, and the social and economic consequences of this stratification are severe...to the point that you cannot perform basic social functions (opening a bank account, ending a property lease, getting certain jobs, etc.) without a good working knowledge of a rather snotty level of french. This is accepted as part of life here; however, in America this isn't SUPPOSED to exist...but it does, and weird little idiomatic things like this are living traces of it. If enough people THINK 'all of the sudden' is redneck, then it is, at least at the functional level.

I live in Florida and am 25. I mention my age because I realize that it, as well as my region, may have weight the issue. I have always heard and said "All of the sudden." It is blatantly obvious to me that it absolutely doesn't matter which version of this you think is correct because a significant number of people say all three of them. It's not just one person butchering something that everyone else says. Millions and millions of people say all three. So get your dictionaries out of your asses if you have them there.

It's evolved from "upon the sudden" or whatever into different manifestations over time. Big deal. Stick to you guns, whatever, but this is a much bigger phenomenon than anyone's personal opinion on the subject.

Anyways, I don't like "all of a sudden" of "all the sudden" personally as much because they sound, for some reason, more hollow to me.

I guess it's sort of like the phantom "-t-" that is placed in some phrases in French. It makes for a more concrete sound .

Argue if you want but it just depends on if the person you are talking to says the same thing. If they do, you're right.

Hey Kenny G, first you say:

"...this is a much bigger phenomenon than anyone's personal opinion on the subject."

but then you say:

"Anyways, I don't like "all of a sudden" or "all the sudden" personally as much because ..."

Who are you kidding? You don't like them only because they're not what YOU normally say. They don't sound quite right to you because they're not the particular idiom that you've internalized. You're as guilty of extending your personal opinion to everyone else as those you criticize.

And while we're at it, if millions of people say "all of the sudden" or "all the sudden", that's really not the point. BILLIONS of people say "all of a sudden". Now, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying any of the three are "right" or "wrong". Clearly all three are used and accepted. However, it seems pretty clear that "all of a sudden" is the most commonly used, standard, if such a word can describe an idiom, with the others being regionalisms.

Compare this to y'all, or howdy, from the southern USA, or youse guys from the northeast. Millions of people say them, but they're dialectical. They're not wrong, but they're definitely regional. I can't imagine, say, the Pope using them.

You are right that I externalized my opinion but it was just matter-of-fact-ly. So poop on you. Excuse the idiom. It is my understanding like I said that no one's version is invalid or uneducated. I wasn't criticizing anyone but those who state clearly that they think others are stupid for saying something other than what they are used to. I did not say anyone was stupid, uneducated or incorrect.

And there are not BILLIONS of people that speak English.

Roughly a bit over a billion people speak English, with about 400 million as a first language. Someone I believe pointed out earlier about how in China people say "all of the sudden".

You may be right in what you said about regionalisms.

Really fun, reading all these posts!
More data for the thread - I'm from South Carolina and have always spoke & heard "all of a sudden." I looked this up because my husband's family (also from South Carolina) uses "all of the sudden" or "all the sudden;" and instead of accusing them of stupidity (yet again), I thought I'd research a little bit.
I think I agree with many of you who have said you'll keep saying it your way, & just be a tad more forgiving of those who say it differently.
It seems as if both phrases could be defined as colloquialisms; however, I'm interested to know which one came into existence first.

By the way: I say "PEEE-can," but only because saying
"pe-CAHN" can get you seriously injured 'round these parts.

hey anonymous-

"Who are you kidding? You don't like them only because they're not what YOU normally say. They don't sound quite right to you because they're not the particular idiom that you've internalized. You're as guilty of extending your personal opinion to everyone else as those you criticize."
-->please re-read Kenney G's post

"And while we're at it, if millions of people say "all of the sudden" or "all the sudden", that's really not the point. BILLIONS of people say "all of a sudden"."
-->where are you getting these fantabulous statistics? Did someone conduct a survey that you are citing? Or did these numbers come magically from the depths of your hindquarters?

"Compare this to y'all, or howdy, from the southern USA, or youse guys from the northeast. Millions of people say them, but they're dialectical. They're not wrong, but they're definitely regional. I can't imagine, say, the Pope using them."
-->Newsflash, the Pope isn't a native English speaker. Plus, thank you for pointing out what is dialectical and what is standard because without your wisdom and authority, the rest of us would be in the dark forever..

I remember "all the sudden" (or sometimes "all uh sudden") was the way kids said it when they were still pretty young. As they became better listeners and readers they realized that the phrase was "all of a sudden" and included all four words when using the expression. I'm over 50 years old and have lived in five states and had never heard "all of the sudden" or "all the sudden" used by a grownup, but today I saw it in in print in the San Francisco Chronicle. It made me feel really old because my first thought was "what is the world coming to!"

What fun reading these posts have been. I have been hearing 'all the sudden' on TV lately and it has caught my attention.
The phrase 'all of a sudden' has been what I have heard all of my life. (Isn't it in 'the night before Christmas.. when all of a sudden there rose such a clatter. I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.?)

I am a speech pathologist and have thought about this for a while. If you say 'all', your tongue is at the top of your teeth, and it slides easily to 'the' rather than jump back for 'of' if you get my drift. So it is easier to just say 'all the sudden' (lazy tongue, I would add) than to say the whole 4 word phrase.

So, it sounds to me like the folks who use the 'all the sudden' have learned it from others who just haven't heard it correctly and have let their tongues slip lazily into 'the'.....

"All of a sudden" adds up better in my mind, and fits well within the pattern of an accepted (if colloquial) grammmatical construction in english. The root phrase "of a sudden" can be used without the modifier "all". The word "all", when added, serves to intensify or emphasize the suddenness. Other examples include "of a piece" "of a tremble". The "of a" seems to turn nouns into adjectives and adjectives into adverbs, just as the suffix -ly would. (Or the prefix a- as in "atremble", which lead me to wonder whether perhaps the "of a ___" construction led to the a- prefix, or perhaps vice versa).

I conjecture that much of the colloquialness of the phrase "all of a sudden" derives from the word "all" serving the (nonliteral) intensifying function, while most of the antiquatedness (and some of the colloquialness) of the phrase lies in the construction "of a ______" being used as a compound adverb, so to speak. (Didn't Shakespeare use the "of a ___" construction, even "of a sudden", admittedly in what might even then have been colloquial usage? Anybody know?)

Whether any of the three versions of the "sudden" phrase "make logical sense" a priori is a largely subjective question, the only possible answers to which are fairly arbitrary. But the phrases don't exist in a void; they exist in the context of the history of language at its current stage of evolution. The fact that "all of a sudden" has been much more common is what determines the variants to be variants.

Therefore, the phrase "all the sudden" is (rightly) going to sound uneducated (or at best lazy) to many people, primarily because it sounds as if what the speaker/writer really meant (but failed to say due to ignorance or laziness) was "all of the sudden". To a lesser degree, the same is true of the use of "all of the sudden", which to many hearers will seem simply a mutation of what they consider the correct "all of a sudden". Ironically, the reverse is also true, so you risk the chalkboard-grating either way.

I should disclose that I grew up hearing both "all of a sudden" and "all of the sudden", but I now use "of a" exclusively and feel that "of the" sounds a bit wrong. Actually, I may have used "of the" when I younger (I can't remember with certainty, but it seems to roll of my tongue too easily not to have been practiced). I was born in north Texas in the mid 1970s and moved to north Arkansas in the early 1980s.

By the way, "of a sudden" (without the "all") would equate to "suddenly". "All of a sudden" is more approximate to "very suddenly". It is more emphatic. No two words or phrases connote exactly the same meaning, thus every word or phrase has its place.

I am in my 40's and grew up saying 'all of a sudden'. In recent years I have noticed the phrase 'all the sudden'. What I have also noticed is that it is being used by younger people - people in their 20's and 30's. It just seems like the new generation is reinventing it to now become 'all the sudden'. Listen closely sometime to people on t.v. and you will probably notice that 'all the sudden' is used a lot by younger people.
I am an avid reader. I grew up in Montana. I have lived in several states, visited many countries, and lived in UK for a few years.
Maybe the version we choose to use has to do with when we were raised, by whom, and where.

I love how this conversation started in 2005 and it is still going on in 2008!
And from a few posts, it seems that the phrase 'all the sudden' is being used mostly by t.v. people - and not just the younger generation. Maybe journalists invented it! Time saving device for precious air time perhaps?

I have always used the "the" version of the phrase. Of course, being an idiom, there is no "proper" use of the term. In fact, if being grammatically formal was the issue, we would stick with "suddenly" and dispense with the idioms completely, eh? With that in mind, either form is incorrect. I wonder what would be part of a sudden. "I have some sudden squirreled away somewhere around here..."

As far as regions where the term "all the sudden" is used, I have another one to add. I taught 5th grade in Southern California (just North of LA) for two years. I had never heard that phrase until I began seeing it (and correcting it) in my students' writing. I also just read the term on my friend's blog. She also lives in SoCal. So, it seems to me that people across the country are using it as the Northeast, Midwest and the South were previously mentioned.
It is my guess that the term "all of the sudden" is spreading because many people are reading less and therefore seeing the idiom in print less frequently. As the incorrect form is heard more often, people around them also pick up on it and continue using the term incorrectly

Hell yeah Dan!!

It must be "all of a sudden" or "suddenly" beause "sudden event" :)

It mustn't be anything. It is a phrase that started out as one thing (I've seen "upon the soden" flying about some of these posts), and has gradually changed to something else.

As far as these phrases go, we are in the middle of what you might call a "sudden" linguistic evolution. People hear things differently (prescriptivists, you can read that as "incorrectly" if it makes you feel better), and the phrase gets passed on to the next generation. Then the slang or colloquial phrase either dies out or becomes the new standard. In 50 years, people may be arguing that it's really "all the sudden" as opposed to some other new phrase cooked up by those lazy, uneducated rednecks (of which I am one).

It happens all of the time. Or is that "all of a time"?

:)

I am interested that no one is offering citations to back their assertions.

Some arguments are fairly well reasoned, but none seem conclusive because adequate references are not provided.

While one phrase may "seem" more correct, more widely used, than another, only statistical analysis can provide an accurate determination. Some statistically based examinations suggest that "all of a sudden" is used more frequently, but precise studies which reveal the distribution and use of the phrases in question are not cited.

Furthermore, grammatical arguments that have been presented are fairly technical, somewhat vague, and, again, do not offer referrals to well-credential sources.

I submit that using a definite article makes the phrase more specific and, therefore, more desirable.

Both "I was surprised by a sudden flash of light" and "I jumped at the sudden movement of her hand" make sense.

Perhaps there is a correllary with the phrase in question. Perhaps context most correctly determines which article should be used.

Thank you for your discussion.

Hutch, AO, I think you both missed something. The word "sudden' is also a noun. The use is archaic, but means a sudden occurrence. Use this obsolete definition and all of a sudden, the expression makes perfect grammatical sense.

In a recent (9/26/08) article Charles Krauthammer said "Now all of the sudden everything is the fault of Wall Street malfeasance." In my 60+ years I've never heard anyone in NC use that expression. It sounds awkward to me, but if it is commonly used in other places, so be it.

My biggest hangup is the usage of "lay" for "lie." I hear it more than 99.9% of the time. I give up!

Chuck, you have touched on one of my pet peeves, people who criticize "Now I lay me down to sleep...", saying that lay should be lie, when, in fact, "lay" in the little poem is correct. I guess that's the opposite of your pet peeve.

All of a sudden I hear broadcasters everywhere saying, "That begs the question," when they mean, "That brings up or suggests the question."
Begging the question is a false argumentative technique, but it's being used in this other sense so often, that it behooves old-fashioned rear-guard grammar activists like me to simply accept it and move on.
Like splitting infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions and using like as an adverb.
All the sudden I feel very old and inconsequential.

"all the sudden" seems to be the standard form in Portland, Oregon.

I think calling people 'uneducated' and claiming that they've 'never read' because they use "the" rather than "of a" is completely ridiculous. My mother is a Language Arts professor and she says "All the sudden." my father has two master's degrees and he says "all the sudden." I'm a high school student in the top percentile and I say "all the sudden." I've also seen "all the sudden" used in the newspaper, and in dialogue in a couple of books.

These kinds of variations are an inevitable part of language, and subject to locality and generation.

I enjoy the commentaries! I am from Wisconsin and believe that I have used "all of the sudden" subconsciously and likely found it normal to say based on my environment. Though I love to read and write, today is my first instance of examining the difference between "all of a sudden" and "all of the sudden." I guess that "all of a sudden" sounds more literary to me. But certainly, for purposes of conversation, either form is effective.

Two things: I just wanted to be the first commenter of 2009, and I am in the "all of a sudden" camp. To hear "all of the sudden" or, even worse, "all the sudden," makes me cringe. I feel somewhat vindicated that "all of a sudden" is considered the "right" way. Verbal communication is very important to me and, although I acknowledge the inevitability of language evolving over time (glad we don't say that "soden" thing any more), I also believe that without some rules, or agreeing that some things are "right" and some things are "wrong" even though through incorrect but widespread usage the "wrong" may eventually be considered "right," verbal chaos will ensue. And long sentences like that are just "wrong."

Thank goodness.... I heard someone say "all the sudden" recently (first time I ever heard it), and I was like.... did I just hear that right? That COULDNT be what he said... that makes no sense!

But that IS what was said, and he's said it many times since. Not sure if this makes a difference, but I'm from the south (Carolina's), and the only person I've heard say this is from the north.

"All of a sudden".... IRegardless (jk) of what you want to call it... slang, an idiom, etc. has always been the version I've known.

Go look up each one at freedictionary.com, or MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM, and take a look for yourself. "ALL OF A SUDDEN" is the only one that comes back with any results!

So, for all of you scholarly folks who are sitting on the fence with comments like "use either one, but if you want to be RIGHT, use suddenly". Well, the people that write dictionaries chose one to be considered acceptable, why is it so hard for you to do the same?

Finally, not to get off topic, but a few other things I hate:

irregardless - REGARDLESS/IRRESPECTIVE
I could care less - I COULDNT CARE LESS
nucular - NUCLEAR

there are many others, but those are some that really bother me.

BOtH phrases are acceptable. "The" is an article, and "a" is an article. One is specific, the other general but both function as articles before nouns. Therefore, if you say "... the sudden" or "...a sudden" you are placing an article before "sudden" implying your use of the word as a noun.

Sudden can be a noun in English, though the use of such is mainly obsolete. Since both phrases are idiomatic, they do not obey all laws of grammar in English, much like proper names. It is not incorrect to use figurative or folk-rooted language, it IS incorrect to apply irrelevant rules or to use unrelated single words as examples when talking on phrases. Words and phrases do not follow the same rules.

Please do not rely on you own opinion and personal experience to determine the truth or accuracy of something. That shows true ignorance of the scientific method and linguistics are in fact, science.

Also, relying on free online dictionaries is not exactly high-level linguistics either.

Some examples of historic usage to prove the case:

"withdrew his opposition all of a sudden" -- W.M.Thackeray
"the driver had swerved on a sudden to avoid a file of geese" -- Ellen Glasgow
"an effect, on the sudden, of real sublimity" -- Walter Pater

You folks who consider yourselves superior can climb down off of your soap boxes now and complain about something else.

im 16 and i dont know which one is the "correct phrase" but who really cares...it depends on how people interpret the phrase. i was just talking to my boyfriend and said "all of THE sudden" and he had the nerve to correct me. maybe the small percentage of people that say all of THE sudden are actually the ones using the phrase correctly. maybe the first time someone ever said the idiom, used THE. over the years, phrases change and people adapt to the language around them. maybe both are wrong. maybe the correct way to say it is all of suddenly...we will never know. so dont go walking around calling people uneducated and correcting people about the way they talk unless ur the one that created the phrase...and then if you are the one that created the phrase, make sure noone else has said something similar, because then more drama will be made over something dumb, such as who is saying a stupid idiom correctly.

so please people, get off ur high horse and get ur heads outta the clouds...get a life.

oh and someone can email me about the topic..this really angered me. and im willing to debate.

I'm shocked at how, in a forum on proper usage of idiom, so many people misspell words and make embarrassing grammatical errors. Take, for example, the girl posting directly above: she constantly makes use of "ur" and types "THE", rather than simply making use of quotation marks. Another poster seemingly refused to capitalize his I's. I don't mind that people write in such a way on forums generally, but on a grammar website I suppose I just expect a bit more.

"All of a sudden" is the correct phrase. "All the sudden" is a butchered idiom, and is probably based upon mis-hearing the phrase without ever having seen it in print. "All of a sudden" means "all at once". It implies stealth, or an unexpected or unpredictable action. "All the sudden" and "all of the sudden" are essentially meaningless. Go to any good online dictionary, such as dictionary.com or m-w.com and look up "all the sudden". It won't be listed. "All of a sudden" will.

Perhaps I have a very strange perspective on linguistic issues, but please hear me out.

When speaking, my goal is not generally to sound educated, but to sound right. A generous application of the "Rock 'n' Roll Rule" means that a contentious phrasing like this one merits a closer look... in the song performance of 20th-century pop culture. After all, nobody defines what sounds to people right better than whoever's considered cool (and stayed that way, of course). And you have audio recordings of what was said (though it may be slurred... or shouted. Or growled).

A search for lyrics across a wide range of sites will turn up far more hits for "all of a sudden" than "all of the sudden". And if you listen to songs in the latter category, it is often the case that whoever transcribed those lyrics heard the words wrong. So conclusively, what seems right to the gods of rock (as well as country and a couple of other genres) is definitely the phrase "all of a sudden", regardless of what is actually correct.

One phrase I had to invent this rule for was "another thing coming" versus "another think coming". It turns out that the latter -- although it sounds wrong to me -- is actually the original, proper phrase. But... if the incorrect way is good enough for Judas Priest, I don't mind being incorrect, I suppose.

Naturally, one is permitted to come up with one's own manner of speaking, but for my purposes, the set of songs with transcribed lyrics gives me a pretty decent (searchable and quantifiable) corpus of casual speech, as opposed to print. Radio, TV, and film are not quite a searchable at present, unfortunately.

In my English compostion class we actually had this discussion with many popular phrases like this. Our school had people from different parts of the country and what we found out was that people in different parts of the country say things differently. It may not necessarily be that one way is right or wrong, it just doesn't seem "normal" to everyone else. An example that stuck out with me was the fact that the kids from the South (Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, etc.) tended to say "accrossed" instead of "accross." For example, "The wind blew acrossed/accross the state." Our teacher explained that it wasnt wrong to say accrossed, but it was just an evolved way of the word accross. The way things are worded over time becomes kind of like the game telephone. Another way to look at it is when European-Americans came to America through New York in the 1700's the people writing down names would sound out the name and write it how they thought it sounded. My lage name is Lage but it could have very well been Large, but the person recording the name could have forgotten the 'R' or it just got lost in translation somewhere along the lines. That is how I look at the way phrases are worded. No way is particularly right, nor wrong.

I'm so glad y'all had this discussion! I am editing a memoir for a friend and trying diligently not to drown out her personal, chatty, slangy style with grammatical dictatorship. She uses the phrase, "all the sudden", and my instinct was to correct it. But reading this discussion confirmed my thought that the phrase was a regional thing and part of her writer's voice. Thanks kids!

Daniel said, "I'm shocked at how, in a forum on proper usage of idiom, so many people misspell words and make embarrassing grammatical errors... refused to capitalize his I's. I don't mind that people write in such a way on forums generally, but on a grammar website I suppose I just expect a bit more."

Well, are you being ironic there with your misuse of the apostrophe in "his I's". It's plural, not possessive.

If any of you can actullay tell me what a "sudden" is,(which would be a noun), I will gladly accept your postulation that it is "all of a sudden", but since the term "all of the sudden" implies an adverb with "sudden" as a form of "suddenly", this form makes more sense gramatically. Not to mention that, "all of a sudden" does not imply an adverb, but implies the totality, (all), of the aforementioned "Sudden", and therefore, does not relate to time, which is the point of the saying, "all of a/the sudden", implying in a short span of time.Many of you have stated that you have only heard "all of a sudden" used all of your life, I am in my mid fifties and have never heard it used untill the last couple of years when all of the people started migrating here from the Northern states. As another poster mentioned, I don't care about where you are from, or what you say there, I am searching for the CORRECT usage.

Here's another, apparently new usage of a word that I counted wrong on a college student's paper just a semester ago: using "REVEAL" as a noun.

For instance, "And now we welcome to our stage... Sarah Palin. She may have a big REVEAL for us about her plans for 2012!"

If a person wants to REVEAL some new information, it's OK by me. But when a person
has a surprise announcement, that''s a REVELATION, and always has been. So far this week, I've heard REVEAL used as a noun 5 or 6 times. Must we dumb down the English language yet again?

Sorry Pat, you're 400 years too late to save English. The OED has a citation for "reveal" as a noun meaning "revelation" from 1629.

When you hang a door, the space between the door and the door frame is called a "reveal", not a "revelation". Also, in a TV ad, the moment when the product is displayed, often as a solution to some consumer problem, is called the "reveal" in the advertising industry.

I am a little surprised that it has never occurred to me to question the phrase "all of a sudden" before. What if it was only part of a sudden? I think I'd like an event to happen at half of a sudden.
In my opinion, if you insist on using the phrase, then "all of the sudden" and "all of a sudden" are equally correct. However, "all the sudden" or "all a sudden" just sound wrong. For those who are insistent about the correct usage, according to the rant I found while checking it out, "all of a sudden" is the correct term, and it's not supposed to make sense if you analyze it.

As for "reveal," there are some small circumstances where it is used as a noun, as porsche pointed out, but it's pretty much never, in normal usage, a substitute for revelation. Sarah Palin is not going to have a reveal for us, she's going to have a revelation for us.

P.S.
I know it's a bit late to respond but...
too funny wrote: "Well, are you being ironic there with your misuse of the apostrophe in 'his I’s'. It's plural, not possessive."
I really, really hate it when people who are wrong "correct" people who are not. For example, when pluralizing a letter, using an apostrophe is the correct format. Just to rub salt in the wound, you also should put periods within quotation marks, never outside of them. Finally, I know this particular rule is obscure, but when you ask a question, you place a question mark at the end of the sentence.

I gathered some statistics to help elucidate some of the claims being made. I searched for occurrences of the three idioms in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the British National Corpus (BNC), and a 3.5-million-word collection of student essays from several states (essays).

"All of a sudden" occurs 5,225 times in COCA, 393 times in BNC, and 45 times in essays. "All of the sudden" occurs 204 times in COCA, never in BNC, and 10 times in essays. "All the sudden" occurs 56 times in COCA, never in BNC, and once in essays. Apparently, "all (of) the sudden" is American English, not British.

COCA tells the date of each citation. "All the sudden" was not found in any of its texts dated 1990-1992, and only once in 1993. It peaked at ten instances in 2007. This is probably too small a sample to be definitive, but it suggests that "all the sudden" is a fairly new expression. (Of course, I've excluded phrases like "Why all the sudden interest?" from my search. We're only looking at synonyms for "suddenly".)

Meg, I agree.

My solution is simply to obviate the issue by not using such a banal expression when a perfectly satisfactory adverb "suddenly" already exists. I occasionally use "all of ___ sudden" in speech I suppose, but never in writing. That's probably why the issue never occurred to me until now, when I noticed it somewhere else in writing.

What is also funny is how this thread has become a general place to complain about common grammar errors.