Thread: Odd words
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Old 10-24-2016, 07:19 AM   #20
gmw
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Are there "theres" over there?

"Theres" possibly doesn't deserve to be here, nor did it seem worth raising a new thread, but I just hit a couple of peculiarities with this uncommon (to me) word.

My email spell checker didn't highlight "theres" when I thought it should ... until I thought about it a bit longer. Despite having thought about it, and always enthusiastic about distractions, I studied it further. Every other spell checker I've tried highlights the word.

From the OED comes this example: "In the Space-field lie innumerable other theres that never have been here."

But the OED does not offer it as an alternative to the much more common "there's" (contraction of of "there is"). Curiously, however, dictionary.com does, at least through the examples that it offers.

So I wondered if maybe the use of "theres" instead of "there's" was an Americanism ... but Merriam-Webster does not show it.

So my question remains: Are there "theres" over there?
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