Chapter&#160;9. <i>Betwixt, amongst</i>, and <i>amidst</i>

The purpose of the paper is to examine, using historical corpora, the diachronic development of variants of the function words between, among, and amid with emphasis on the variants with final /st/, i.e. betwixt, amongst, and amidst. In Present-day English, the variants with final /st/ have a more formal, literary, or archaic ring to them than their counterparts without it. In older English, however, the former variants were more widely used than they are today. This paper addresses how individual variants – especially ones with final /st/ – came into being, how they competed with one another in terms of frequency in each period, and how this resulted in the Present-day English distribution.

• Affiliations: 1: Keio University