Latin words

The Norman invasion made Latinate French the language of the ruling classes. English ended up with both Latin and English words for many of the same concepts.

While this greatly enriched our language, a Latinate alternative is often longer, more complex and less common to the general population.  Government and business turn to these terms to sound impressive, but this can come at the expense of readability and efficiency.

Prefer English words over their Latinate equivalents, especially if you’re writing for the public. Of course, if a Latinate term has no equivalent in English, that's perfectly fine. But don't dress up your style when the content doesn't demand it. 

The following Latin abbreviations are fairly common in workplace writing. As the related ASG entries explain, we recommend avoiding them in body text and reserving them for informal communications and where space is limited.

If you do use them, put a comma before them and don’t add full stops (unless ‘etc’ falls at the end of a sentence).

The Latin preposition 'per' means 'for each'. It indicates the frequency of something by a period or some other variable.

'Per' is also used between 2 measurements to show a rate, where it can also be represented by the forward slash (60km/hr).

We recommend replacing 'per' with an indefinite article ('a' or 'an') in most cases. There is no need for a less familiar Latin term when a simple English word does the job.

And you should definitely avoid full Latin phrases such as 'per annum', unless your audience is very familiar with them.

Latin follows strict patterns for singular and plural words. But English usage is gradually shifting some of the traditional forms to an English plural.

For example, many singular English words ending in ‘um’ would take an ‘a’ in the Latinate plural. However, English has pluralised some of these words with an ‘s’, in line with conventional English plurals.

Here are some examples that have made this transition.

What’s more, you need to watch out for words such as:

• data
• bacteria
• media.

Many now treat these words as singular as well as plural.

Some Latin phrases may be hard to avoid in a legal setting. These are known as ‘terms of art’ and are generally well understood by legal practitioners. Some have recognised meaning in statutes and in case law, so they are hard to replace even though most public readers would struggle to translate them. If that is the case, try to give a brief explanation in a text to guide readers with limited legal knowledge.