“For ever after” is a phrase I found curious recently, as it highlights some interesting points about how English works as a flexible, evolving language.
The phrase can be written in two different ways, changing the meanings of the words, with no real agreement on the “correct” form. Both forms roughly mean the same thing, and as such the way people say, write or understand this phrase is likely based on a chosen style, not a difference in intention or a logically assessed reasoning.
So, let’s explore the differences, the shifts in popularity and what that means for the way we look at such inconsistencies in English.
First up, what does the phrase mean? “For ever after” is an adverbial phrase (often regarded as an idiom) that essentially means “for all time from this point on”. It’s similar to the classic fairy tale ending “happily ever after”, or the word “forevermore”.
For example:
- They got married and lived together for ever after.
- The countries signed a treaty and were at peace forever after.
How should we write “for ever after”?
Let’s break down the two ways “for ever after” can be written. I’ve used the form that clearly separates the words so far, but this is not the one I’m most familiar with; I would typically write “forever after” myself, which is why I wanted to look into the phrase in more detail. We can essentially see this as using one of two different adverbials:
- for [ever after]
- [forever] after
As in “happily ever after”, “ever after” is an idiomatic phrase meaning “everything from this point on”; the first option makes sense in the regard “for the duration of everything from this point on”. There’s also a case to be made, somewhat loosely, that we could even write “everafter”, for a third option, “for everafter”, but that is not common or really accepted. Over time it might become more popular if “ever after” develops into a true compound word.
On the other hand, “forever after” uses the adverb “forever” to mean “all time”, in the same regard, “all the time after this point”. However, I’m picking at this a bit to show some sort of difference – it’s hard to actually form a definition for either form that wouldn’t work for the other. So we have different component words with slightly different meanings, but result in basically the same outcome.
What is the most common way to say “for ever after”?
While we can already fairly say either option is acceptable, what ultimately dictates “correct” English (that being the most easily accepted or understood) is popular use. Logically, I think there’s a strong case that “for ever after” makes most sense as it applies the idiomatic phrasing. Most likely the phrase will be used to affect that kind of idiomatic expression. However, “forever after” feels more right to me personally, mostly as it emphasises that longevity. Or maybe just because it looks neater to have two words instead on one. Either way, it’s perfectly acceptable to go on gut feeling with this, or with whatever you were first taught, or like the look of, and I think that says quite a lot about how the English language often works. No doubt people would argue for one form over another, but there’s no way to definitively settle on a superior, meaning we must accept both.
What we can now do, though, is look at the statistics of usage for more insights. One of the tools I use to analyse popular phrasing is Google’s Ngram Viewer, which analyses a huge database of writing from (currently) 1800–2019. You can enter phrases and compare how their popularity has changed. Here are the results for the three different forms of the phrase.
From this data, you can see that “forever after” has held a fairly common amount of usage, overtaking “for ever after” in 1888 and establishing itself as the more popular phrasing for the next 130 years. However, throughout the 19th century “for ever after” was much more popular, and its usage apparently dramatically declined. We can draw a few conclusions from this but the most obvious would seem to be that “for ever after” was probably used in a specific type of writing, which gradually faded – probably the sort of fairy tales and romances that first popularised “happily ever after” endings. With the decline of such books, the phrase itself was used less, while it would seem that the “forever after” style, which has remained fairly consistent, was less reliant on such trends. Perhaps “forever after” has longer been a staple in common usage, with “for ever after” more tied to a particular type of writing.
That’s a bit of speculation on my behalf but hopefully serves as an example of the sort of detail we can go into when considering the “correct” way to word something – and why it’s not necessarily something that depends on meaning or language logic!
I hope you found this interesting. Let me know your thoughts, and of course feel free to explore other similar examples in the comments!
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Your analysis is intriguing and inspired me to think again about conjoining words such as “for” and “ever” to mean something subtly different.
There seems to be a lack of logic in when we can combine such words. A string of prepositions can be clumsy and disjointed, and yet I do not know when they can be put together as one word. My favourite example of this is “insofar as” – why not unify the whole expression?
I have thought often about words such as “into”, “onto” and “unto”; and why not “upto”? “A number upto N” is logical and sensible, and yet is not the accepted norm. I presume that this is because “up to” used not to be used as frequently as the other expressions and so became stuck outside the family of common conjoined prepositions. (Apparently a conjoined preposition is not a conjunction!). Personally, I have instructed my word processor to accept “upto”, and I live in hope that my efforts will lead to a modification in common usage. After all, it is meant to be evolving language, and if American English can evolve to make “I could care less” mean there is nothing I care less for, then there is hope for for you and I (sic).
PS: I couldn’t refrain from that last comment. I was taught that the best way to eliminate a bad law is to enforce it, but that doesn’t seem to work with laws of language – the badder the better!
Hi Andrew,
Indeed, you’re absolutely right – it is curious how some words get combined and others do, though yes it all comes down to popular usage. Some things get adopted more commonly than others, and part of it might just be often often they’re used, as you suggest with “up to”, though I suppose there are other factors involved such as how the words sound (into and onto, for example, have a softer consonant with ‘n’ whereas the ‘p’ of up to more naturally keeps the words separate – just speculating there!). There’s no real telling though, and indeed perhaps if you lead the way eventually upto will become accepted as well!
And you’re not wrong about that last point. “could care less” is one of my own personal bugbears; studying language across the world I try to avoid judging any particular uses but that one has held out longer than most in my ire! But I’ve slowly come to accept it; these things certainly aren’t going to go away because people don’t like them!
Reading Andrews comment about no co-joined “upto”, I immediately had “upturn” pop into my mind, which we do use.
I dislike the joining of words where two “o”s meet without using a hyphen as they feel to me that they ought then be pronounced “oo” if they are not to mess up our English language spelling and pronunciation even more than it now is. A common example is cooperation instead of co-operation.
Hi Lori,
Yes, double-vowel ones in general can easily appear unclear and I think it’s a lot of people’s instincts to keep the hyphen, so only with really popular use do I think we see the hyphen disappear there (hence there are still plenty co-o… and re-e… examples we would not combine!).
Phil
I’m not sure I get the point you’re trying to make in this article, Phil. I don’t see much if any difference in how these words are actually spoken, which is the title of the piece. Clearly there’s a difference in how they’re written, which fits the narrative about how English is an evolving language, but the gist of what’s meant by this expression is the same, surely?
PS I too cringe when I hear “I could care less”. Thankfully I’m old enough to not want to accept it!
Hi Paul,
I appreciate that it’s a pretty picky point, and you’re right there’s no real discernible difference in the way we say or understand either form, but the piece (and title) was aimed at how it’s written rather than spoken. Essentially in its the interests of how we look at enforcing rules in editing. What I wanted I get at it with it overall is that this is an area where people may have a definite opinion or style and consider the other option to be incorrect, and I wanted to explore how both can actually be justified with quite different reasoning, but we come out with the same result.
Hope that makes sense! That and it just seemed interesting to me!
Phil
Many thanks for the clarification,Phil. You’re right, it’s an interesting point and certainly highlights how the language changes.