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Why do Americans say disoriented instead of disorientated?

April 26, 2017Americans disoriented Education Reference Wordplay words

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Why do Americans say disoriented instead of disorientated?

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Because both “disoriented” and “disorientated” are perfectly acceptable usages, whatever side of the Atlantic. Any question like this really needs answering with corpus data, because people’s personal peeves tend not to be accurate about usage. Check out recent UK newspapers via Google News: “disorientated” 52 hits http://news.google.co.uk/news/search?aq=… “disoriented” 27 hits http://news.google.co.uk/news/search?aq=… NewsBank, the UK newspaper online archive for 1982-present gives similar results: “disorientated” 7751 hits / “disoriented” 2850 hits This shows they coexist in UK English, so there are no grounds to view Americans (or anyone else) as bizarre for using “disoriented”. Nor is “disorient” a misnomer or Americanism that has caugh

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Well, I looked it up because I didn’t believe “disorientate” was a word. However, it is, and it means “disorient.” Americans don’t use disorientate at all. We use disorient; therefore, we use disoriented. We also use rotate and rotated. Disorientate must be a British usage.