Often is used more often. :P Hehe
Edit: But if you say "oft", people will usually understand that you mean often. It's clearer to say often though :)
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Gonna be honest, I don't live in either country, but I do spend a lot of time listening to Americans and Londoners, and I don't actually hear them say "oft" at all. They say "often".
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If you wanna say multiple times or repeatedly I would go with often.
I didn't even know oft is a word in english as well... It does howewer exist in german and means often.
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That's true! We're arguing with friends at the moment, whom belongs this word and who uses it more often, germans or english speakers
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Im deutschsprachigen Raum verwenden wir das ziemlich oft :D
So my two cents oft = german, often = english
I never heard oft in an english conversation
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Not a native speaker myself but I know oft is an archaic form of often. Nowadays it's highly unlikely to hear it in casual conversation but it's still being used occasionally, mostly by news outlets.
If you happen to hear it it's usually followed by something that signals duration or repetition such as "oft repeating"
At least that's my understanding of it.
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Correct answer. You won't find "oft" much outside of texts such as Shakespeare's work. https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=define+oft&rlz=1C1CHBD_en-GBGB733GB733&oq=define+oft&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.1106j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
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In terms of speaking English as in London (don't know about anywhere else). Oft is almost never used in conversation, it's more of an old way of saying often.
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Afik oft is only used in some word combinations. For the rest of the time it is often.
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Oft is basically archaic, and seldom used. Much like the word opine for having an opinion, it effectively means the same thing but has slightly different contextual usage. For example one could say this: I opine these words are less oft used than they were historically. The non-archaic phrasing for this could instead be: It is my opinion that these words are used less often than they were historically.
I'm no linguist or even an English major at all, so I can't get into too many nuanced details here, I just read a lot. lol
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Eh, thanks for clarification from US :-)
For some reason I've thought it was more used in US than in UK, since it's more short and convinient
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That is fair, and I think a lot of our published and network news media and such do use it in certain situations far more than any of the people really do, probably for that reason. They tend to like shorter words to save on print space, and/or air time. There are certain turns of phrase that are used that where it might come up, but aside from that, really, it's just an archaic holdover. I think it's generally pretty uncommon to ever hear a person use it normally, unless they are weird people like me that read a lot and use words that are technically correct but in archaic or used in an archaic form.
I still remember having my English professor correcting my papers for a bunch of that that I do without thinking, like the technically correct but somewhat atypical usage of "import" for importance. So I'd say in a line that something "was of significant import" and I'd end up with a correction from my professor changing that to "importance" every time, and was always just going "but that means the same thing both ways, why would you mark that wrong?"
Also, I saw your comment above about whether it belongs more to English or German, and the answer really is both. English is Germanic, and so oft is a holdover from Old & Middle English, which is based in archaic German. Plus, well, English just likes to steal words anyway and keep them for itself in general.
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You all got germanys go signal for using our words!
I was able to cope with the Kindergarden thingy just fine when we learned that in our english classes, putting it off as a one time mishap.
Years later i was surprised out of my mind learning that americans use words like Mishmash or Doppelganger.
And it does´nt end! Most recently on PCGamer or RPS somebody went on about Wimmelbilder..
Need new name for your cellphone/mobile? We call it a "handy" XD
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Don't forget Rucksack and Schadenfreude ;) Another one of my favourites is "Sheit" because it seems to be kind of a hybrid between shit and Scheisse.
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I just now asked leo.org about oft. It says that it also is used in English, but it's old school. Honestly I have never heard it in English anyway. So I guess we as Germans only use oft in German. Just stick to often ;)
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"oft"
adverb
archaic or literary form of often.
"an oft-quoted tenet"
Done. Why everyone is using their own personal experiences over the actual definition to explain is beyond me. It just makes things more confusing for non-English speakers.
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Thanks!
Expirience also means a lot, we're living not among a bunch of books and everyday language is used much more often than books :-)
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That's true, it does matter. Mostly when slang comes into play.
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For me as a foreigner it's not entirely clear, is it in use now, or only in some parts of english world and what's in common use now? Or is it some old archaism?
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