There are other times when two words are slightly different and mean very different things. Finally, there are a few times when two words are slightly different, mean the same thing, but you should still use one instead of the other.
Orientated and oriented are an example of this third instance. Oriented and orientated are past tense verbs that mean to align position with a fixed reference point such as a compass or to get one's bearings in a new or strange environment.
I'm usually the one smirking and correcting the people who use it. I'd downvote you for the pun, except I'm still chuckling. Martin F 4 4 silver badges 14 14 bronze badges. Care to back this up with evidence? Personally I find "orientated" quite irritating. John englishplus. I found similar comments here wordwizard. John,ukayer: According to Google Books, on the American corpus oriented is about 60 times more common than orientated.
But if you follow that link and switch to the British corpus, you'll see that it's only about 5 times more common in the UK. So orientate still a long way from being "standard", but it's over 10 times more "acceptable" to Brits than Americans and it's fine by me : — FumbleFingers. FumbleFingers: It's still a minority representation in the UK, by far. Don't think it's standard in British English Check out google's ngrams data on on British English oriented vs orientated: books.
Tristan Tristan 2, 17 17 silver badges 7 7 bronze badges. To me, the verb, orient, sounds decidedly odd and I was totally unaware of its existence as a verb and its usage in the US until today.
Glad you found a reliable reference to back up your "orientate" usage. Mari-LouA and Tristan, I agree completely, and I wish the various commentators who say how irritated they are by this word would accept that that is not evidence for it being 'wrong'.
If I hadn't read this post first I would have assumed 'orientate' was the older term which had been shortened to 'orient' in AmE - rather like Robusto saying 'as an alternate' when the proper word is 'alternative. Add a comment. The t sound drops off too fast because of the word ending.
Both t sounds are emphasized because they form the sound tayt and demand to be articulated. MetaEd Can people please explain their downvotes I don't know why, but it really is easier to say - a brit.
Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Linked 3. See more linked questions. Related 6. Hot Network Questions. The answer to that question is that there is no demonstrable difference in use or function between the two, and they can be used completely interchangeably.
That said, one option is widely shunned, and there is a clear choice that you should pick in your writing. What does oriented mean? Although there is no real difference in meaning or function between the two words, there is clearly a better choice, and that is oriented.
If you look at the graph below, you can see just how little orientated is used in American English. This is reason enough to avoid orientated in your writing, for the simple fact that its use will cause your readers to perk their ears and question your word choice, distracting them from the actual content of your work.
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