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A paradigm gap has long separated the fields of World Englishes and Learner Englishes: they have mainly been dealt with separately and very little consideration has been given to the features that they might share. Recently, however, Nesselhauf (2009) has highlighted that some features thought to be variety-specific are in fact shared by World and Learner varieties. This paper examines their use of the high-frequency verb make in samples of corpora of student writing of four World Englishes, four Learner Englishes and a control corpus of English as a Native Language (ENL). This case study shows that, quantitatively, the World and Learner varieties are mainly characterized by heterogeneity, while qualitatively, a number of similarities distinguish them from ENL.