Grammar girl here, I'm Minion Fuggedy.

In this week, I have a quick and dirty tip for Halloween about the difference between

a graveyard and a cemetery.

A meaty middle about peer editing and a tidbit about using calendar as a verb.

It turns out it's common in certain professions.

And now onto our quick and dirty tip.

Cavesyards and cemeteries are both places we bury our dead, but technically they have

slightly different meanings.

Cemetery is the much older word going back to Roman times.

Today, a cemetery is a large burial ground, typically not associated with a church.

The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for Graveyard comes from 1767, and a graveyard

is typically smaller than a cemetery, and is often associated with a church.

It's part of the church yard.

Cemetery appears to be the more commonly used word today, perhaps because it's been

around longer, perhaps because people like the sound of it better, or perhaps because

there are so many more people buried in cemeteries because there's so much bigger than graveyards.

It was actually the population growth in Europe that led to the creation of large cemeteries,

because the small church yards couldn't hold all the dead anymore.

So I'm inclined to think the popularity as a resting place is also the reason the word

is more popular, but that's just a guess.

And here's a bonus.

Do you know why sailors call the late shift the graveyard watch?

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