Regarding 'regards'

And geeking out on whether dictionaries mean what they say

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Norm Quesnel, of Framingham, Mass., writes: “My mother used to cringe when somebody said in regards to.” It should be in regard to, she'd say. Similarly, with regard to, not with regards to.

“To me, regards are recognition and best wishes passed along from others. For example, ‘Give my regards to your dad’ — or ‘to Broadway.’

“Regard is pointing attention to something. For example, ‘In regard to your email, you may need help.’ But I almost never hear in regard to; nearly always it’s in regards to. Do you have an opinion or maybe a grammar rule concerning the usage of regards and regard?”

Norm, you’re right that the correct phrase is in regard to, and the Oxford English Dictionary as much as says so. Under the headword “regard, noun,” it defines “in regard of or to” and “with regard to” without comment but tags “in regards to” as “regional and nonstandard.”

Merriam-Webster too agrees with you, though more indirectly. Its entry for “regard, noun,” includes the phrases “in regard to: with respect to: concerning” and “with regard to: in regard to,” but doesn’t give the comparable phrases with the plural regards, implying that they’re not used in our language.

And there’s the answer to your question. In regard to is better English. But if I may, I’d like to geek out on how far we should trust dictionaries.

Both the OED and M-W call themselves “descriptive,” as today’s dictionaries tend to do. The OED says, “Our editorial policy is to describe language and usage based on real-world evidence, rather than to dictate or prescribe how language should be used.” And Merriam-Webster says it “is a descriptive dictionary in that it aims to describe and indicate how words are actually used by English speakers and writers. Generally, the descriptive approach to lexicography does not dictate how words should be used or set forth rules of ‘correctness,’ unlike the prescriptive approach.”

I take these assertions with a grain of salt, and the dictionaries’ treatment of in regards to is a fine example of why I’m mistrustful: Primary sources prove them wrong.

The website English Corpora is something like an index to, well, English-language corpora (that’s the plural of corpus), which are, per Wikipedia, “collections of authentic, ‘real world’, text of speech or writing that aim to represent a given linguistic variety.”

For example, the Corpus of Contemporary American English contains 1 billion words in context scraped over the period 1990 to 2019 from a “balanced” range of American sources. News on the Web (NOW) contains more than 20 billion words, dating from 2010 to “yesterday,” from English-language news sources in 20 countries. It adds “120-140 million words of data each month (from about 250,000 new articles), or about 1.5 billion words each year.” So it’s up to date.

And according to NOW, for the period November 30, 2020, to November 30, 2024, it has collected 12,637 citations from U.S. news sources that include in regard to and 20,925 including in regards to. As Jon Stewart would say, BOOM! A truly descriptive dictionary would call in regards to standard, at least in the U.S. So on this point at least, the OED and M-W either are not paying attention or are prescriptivists pretending not to be.

I am, however, proudly prescriptivist, and Norm, you seem to be too. I don’t know how it could happen that dictionaries would go back to telling us straightforwardly what is truly standard English — the kind that, as I said previously, is to be found in most newspapers and on radio and TV news programs, and in textbooks, works of nonfiction, FAQ, descriptions that accompany museum exhibits, and many, many other places. I hope it does happen, though.

In regard to that, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Email me with your language questions, peeves, problems, etc., at barbaraswordshop@gmail.com, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Correspondence may be edited. If you subscribe to The Boston Globe, look for my column, “May I Have a Word,” in the Ideas section every other Sunday.