Toward or Towards Part IV

The OED, which is a historical dictionary (i.e., it lists all the forms and functions that a word has had throughout the history of the language) lists toward and towards as separate headwords. Indeed, there are two entries for toward—the first being the adjective and adverb and the second being the preposition. Towards has only one entry, as preposition and adverb.

In a visually more helpful way:

toward, adjective and adverb
toward, preposition
towards, preposition and adverb

Now, both the adjectival and adverbial uses of toward and towards, respectively, have fallen out of use. (The Concise Oxford still has toward, adj., listed as an archaic form, but I for one am ready to call it obsolete.) Since both toward and towards also functioned as prepositions, what we have is a falling together of two separate words to perform one function, that of a preposition meaning "in the direction of."

So now we have:

toward, adjective and adverb
toward, preposition 
towards, preposition and adverb

And that's why modern English speakers are saddled with two variants. Toward and towards were originally two separate words performing closely related and overlapping functions. Only one of those functions remains in modern English, but both forms have survived. If you like, the -s form is a relic.

(Of course, many linguists would disagree that they were ever two totally separate words, but I don't want to get into the messy business of defining what a word is.)

And in case you are wondering how toward could ever have been an adverb without the -s ending, the OED states that "the advb. use appears to arise out of the predicative use of the adj., or from the neuter adj." That is, the word acquired an adverbial function without changing its form (a process that linguists term zero derivation).

(Another possibility: In Old English, adverbs were also formed with an -e ending, which disappeared in Middle English. This is why it is actually still possible to form adverbs with no adverbial ending per se, as in the phrase dead slow. Some self-appointed grammarians like to huff and puff about people who don't know the difference between adjectives and adverbs, but in fact the "endingless" adverb has a very long history in the English language.)

So, to summarize my posts so far: Which is correct, toward or towards? Both are correct. Is toward American and towards British? No, not really. Does the -s in towards mean anything? Yes.

What were some examples of toward as an adjective and toward/towards as an adverb? That's for my next post (which, I promise, is the last in this dull series).