Grammar girl here, this week I'll talk about champing at the bit versus chomping at the bit.

We'll talk to the savvy psychologist about how our brains process hearing people exaggerate

numbers, and finally I'll reveal my pick for word of the year.

Mark E. from Portland, Oregon said he regularly comes across the phrase chomping at the bit,

but he believes it should be champing at the bit.

Mark has a point, the original phrase is indeed champing at the bit,

but chomping at the bit emerged in America in the 1930s according to the Oxford English

Dictionary, and is overtaken champing at the bit in common use.

A Google web search for chomping at the bit returns about twice as many results as a

search for champing at the bit.

Champing at the bit is still used just slightly more often than chomping at the bit in published

books, but you can see chomping rapidly gaining ground in the Google and Gram chart that

shows how often words and phrases are used in books.

And chomping has actually overtaken champing even in published books if you filter the

search so that you look at just American English.

Champ is an older, more formal word that means to Nash or chew on something as a horse

would a bit, but we don't use champ much in American English.

We're more likely to use the more informal word chomp, which is probably why people

remember the phrase incorrectly.

Frequency alone doesn't make champing at the bit correct, but most style guides

and dictionaries I checked also refrain from going so far as to say that it's incorrect.

This is language change at the point where you probably can't win, no matter which

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