Welcome to Off the Clock — where we step away from the urgent and indulge the enduring.
Every other Saturday, I send a private note to subscribers exploring the curious corners of language, history, and the words we think we know—but don’t.
There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from being wrong about something for a very long time. It’s the confidence of the person who says “I could care less” with great feeling, or who insists that a sentence cannot end with a preposition. It is, in short, the confidence of someone who is about to be gently corrected by a dictionary (or a grammarian) — and who will not enjoy the experience.
Such is the fate of nearly everyone who writes ’til or ’till, honestly believing they’re abbreviating until, confidently tucking in that apostrophe like a verbal pocket square. The truth, as Merriam-Webster will calmly inform you, is considerably more humbling.
From Merriam-Webster:1
till
preposition / conjunction
or ’til or less commonly til — until.
“Many assume that till is an abbreviated form of until. In fact, it is a distinct word that existed in English at least a century before until. It has seen continuous use in English since the 12th century and is a perfectly legitimate synonym of until.”
I’ll give you a moment to let the implication sink in: till did not descend from until. If anything, until descended from till.
The word strutting around in borrowed apostrophe-finery is the newcomer; the plain, unfussy, double-l original has been tilling the fields of English prose since before the Norman Conquest had time to feel embarrassed about itself.
The apostrophe in ’til is an elision mark signaling a missing letter — but no letter is missing. Till is already complete. The apostrophe is a guest who arrived before the party was even planned.
The word till, in its temporal sense, traces back to Old English and Old Norse, where til meant simply “to” or “up to.” It is a word of Viking lineage, salt-weathered and honest.
Until came later, formed by grafting the Old Norse prefix und- (meaning “up to”) onto till itself — making until, in a delicious reversal, the compound form. To shorten until back to till is not abbreviation; it is archaeology.
Three Spellings Enter, Not All Leave with Their Dignity
And yet here we are, with three spelling variants jostling for position on the page like passengers in a train car, each with a slightly different claim to legitimacy. How do should you use each of them?
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