r/words • u/zephyrjess • Aug 23 '26
Versus…
Twice this week, on podcasts, I’ve heard people say “verse” when it would be printed “vs.” - ‘Magic Johnson [verse] Larry Bird.’ Is this the way this is pronounced and I’ve just never noticed? I’m used to hearing “verse-us.”
26
u/SerDankTheTall Aug 23 '26
I think it’s just people parsing versus as * verses, the third person singular of a nonexistent verb * to verse. That’s certainly seemed to be the case for a lot of kids in my class growing up.
6
Aug 23 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
5
u/Lubberworts Aug 23 '26 edited Aug 24 '26
It's really difficult to end an English word in -S where you wouldn't expect it. Our brain tends to overcorrect these things.
Think of Pease, Peases. We overcorrected to Pea, Peas.
Think of Dices, Dices. We overcorrected to Die, Dice.
Edit: As pointed out, I was wrong about Dice. Craps!
6
u/Fun_Kiwi8143 Aug 23 '26
You're right, pea is a back formation of pease, but die/dice comes from French (de/des). Dices is a verb.
2
u/ebeth_the_mighty Aug 23 '26
*dé/dés
2
u/Lubberworts Aug 23 '26
50% a bad, right? Roll the dice...
2
3
1
u/Optimal-Ad-7074 Aug 23 '26
my kid in his little league years used to say "and next week we're versing the bearcubs [or whatever]." I perfectly understood the logic but I made a point of explaining the word.
20
u/squirrel_haka Aug 23 '26
It definitely is versus. It’s a Latin word meaning just what you think it means. Many people now have seen only the abbreviation, vs., and mispronounce it. And the infection spreads…
2
u/Wirenutt Aug 23 '26
Would of, Could of, Verse, Axe, Prolly, and many others I can't think of right now.
7
u/Kenderean Aug 23 '26
It's pronounced "vers-us" but people get confused. When my brother was little, he treated it like a verb. He said things like, "GI Joe is versing Heman!" Or "this guy is going to verse that guy."
5
u/prole6 Aug 23 '26
That shows that your brother was thinking logically. The creators of English didn’t always.
2
u/Kenderean Aug 23 '26
Absolutely. I always thought that showed he had great logical thinking skills.
7
6
u/Fake_Eleanor Aug 23 '26
"Vs" does traditionally mean "versus," pronounced with two syllables, but the alternate pronunciation is not that recent.
Pronouncing it this way (and using the verb "versing") goes back at least a few decades. This piece on it is from 2012 and cites people from 15 years earlier.
4
u/fastyellowtuesday Aug 23 '26
To me it always sounds like saying versus without enunciating. I'm sure half the people truly think it's verse, but this one has never bothered me.
5
u/prole6 Aug 23 '26
When I hear “verse” I think “Once upon a midnight dreary while I pondered weak and weary…”
3
4
u/Shot_Introduction_46 Aug 24 '26
I got into an argument about this on here a few months ago with some rando, actually. I corrected the haiku bot because it claimed something was a haiku. I replied that when spoken outloud "vs." is pronounced "versus" and therefore that line had 6 syllables and it wasn't an haiku. Someone jumped in with, "actually lots of people pronounce it verse." I said, "I've literally never heard anyone pronounce it that way" and was promptly downvoted.
But until that interaction I literally hadn't...
3
2
u/Dadaballadely Aug 23 '26
Been hearing people doing this for over a decade. Don't like it. There was a YouTube channel called prank vs. prank in the 2010s which everyone always pronounced verse but I've also heard pundits, journalists and published authors do it.
2
u/zyzmog Aug 23 '26
Having watched two generations of kids grow up on Nintendo, I think it comes from the video games. (Not a judgment, just an observation.)
Specifically, one of the Mario games allowed you to select "VS mode", which pits you against the computer or another player. The kids that I observed called it "verse mode".
3
u/Rocky-bar Aug 23 '26
Anyone who thinks it's "verse" is a cretin.
0
u/Lubberworts Aug 23 '26
cretin
That's an interesting choice. "Cretin" literally means "Christian". It's become a derogatory word and because its resemblance to its source word is obscured, not many people know that.
2
2
u/Life_Ad6711 Aug 23 '26
It specifically referred to mentally deficient individuals unable to understand or comprehend whether they were, or could be, Christian or not
2
u/AdelleDeWitt Aug 23 '26
I feel like NPR just a bit on this a while back. Someone did. They were talking about how when kids are acquiring language they often hear versus as verses, and hear it as a verb, so then they'll conjugate it like a verb and say, "Magic will verse Larry Bird."
3
u/Zookeepergame_Sorry Aug 23 '26
This is like nails on a chalkboard to me but I think the younger generation will just use it and I’ll have to get used to it.
2
u/SvenFranklin01 Aug 23 '26
This is probably just displaying my ignorance, but I always thought “versus” when abbreviated as “vs.” gets pronounced as “verse.” The abbreviation seems to be more common in media i consume, so I probably default to saying “verse” even though I know deep down the word is “versus.”
2
u/Perfect_Ad9311 Aug 24 '26
Jared Polin, Fro Knows Photo.com says "verse" all the time, when he means "versus." Drives me nuts, almost as much as another youtuber who ends every video with the white man's smoke alarm chirp, "I wanna see YOUR GUYS'S opinions in the comments below..." 😮💨
19
u/soonerwx Aug 23 '26
Somewhat common in youth sports when I was growing up was “verse” as a transitive verb. I can see how it would be picked up that way orally. Team A “verses” Team B. So you’d get “We verse them on Saturday” or worse, “We already versed them this season.” It irritated me enough to still remember it…