Mar 2, 2021
The Difference between "Breadth" and "Width": Solving a Word Choice Problem with COCA
- feathertouchediting
- Aug 29
- 9 min read
Updated: Sep 14
What's the Difference?
I'd always thought width and breadth were synonyms, but one day I came across width used in an odd way in a document I was editing. I no longer recall the sentence, but I remember the phrase: "width of experience." Surely that should be "breadth of experience"?
This led me to investigate the words width and breadth. Googling turned up a cluster of websites (WordReference forums, Grammarist, etc.) whose consensus could be summarized as follows: (1) breadth can be used figuratively, whereas width cannot and (2) in the context of physical measurements, breadth is preferably used with large entities, whereas width is preferably used with small entities.
The Figurative Use of "Breadth"
The figurative use of breadth (as opposed to its literal use, e.g., "the breadth of the room") is well established. For example, the Webster's app on my Android phone gives the meanings "comprehensive quality" or "scope" (with the example "the breadth of his learning") and "liberality of views or taste" (with the example "breadth of mind"). The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English has this entry for breadth: "(formal) enormous breadth of experience and insight."
However, intriguingly, the entry for width in Webster's has "largeness of extent or scope" as one of the meanings—but no example is given.
My intuition told me to change "width of experience" to "breadth of experience," but I needed evidence to support the change. Some authors do ask why a certain change was made, and quoting an established authority is the simplest and most effective reply. I had enough evidence for the correctness of "breadth of experience," but that annoying meaning in Webster's for width muddied the waters just a little. Was "width of experience" plain wrong or was it inelegant but acceptable? I was sure this usage was wrong, but I continued to play devil's advocate. How could I convince a stubborn skeptic that I practiced evidence-based editing? Well, if we can't find the evidence in established theory (dictionaries, handbooks, etc.), maybe we can find it in praxis? How are these words and phrases used out there in the wild?
Enter the Corpus of Contemporary English (COCA)
This is a resource that I stumbled on many years ago and had been using intermittently like a glorified Google Search, but it's only recently that I realized it's true value. I intend to introduce COCA more fully in a future blog post, but for now, let me show how it can be applied to the problem at hand.
Head over to the COCA website at https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/.
In the search box, type (without the quotation marks) "breadth of NOUN". The results should look something like this:
This Web page is packed with information! The numbers in the "ALL" column are the total number of hits across all genres. The genre names (the column headers in the left pane) are self-explanatory. The right pane distributes the hits across four-year spans. It doesn't require much imagination to see how useful this kind of information can be. Note that one can drill down and investigate further by clicking on the numbers to see the hits themselves as sentence fragments and then drill down even further to see more of the surrounding text.
The results show that "breadth of" is used figuratively in a number of ways, the abstract nouns varying from "knowledge" (the most common) to "skills" (the least common, at least on this page). Note also the high frequencies in the ACAD (it stands for "academic") column, supporting the "formal" tag in the BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English's entry for breadth. Selecting "Chart" in the Search page for "breadth" produces the following graphical comparison across genres. ACAD is the topper among genres, and the distribution over time is balanced.
Next, let's search COCA for "width of NOUN":
The contrast is striking: the results are sparse, and the nouns are physical objects, not abstract nouns—with the exceptions of the strange anomalies "width of confidence" and "width of travel," which do not inspire confidence (pun intended). On drilling down, we find that "width of confidence" expands to "width of confidence intervals" and "width of travel" to "width of travel lanes," which are physical—not figurative—use cases.
The verdict? It's an open-and-shut case, and these two results pages would convince even the most stubborn skeptic: "width of experience" is not acceptable.
Now, one could use the Google Ngram tool to do something similar, but COCA is the better choice for professional work with language (as a copyeditor, I think I can wear that hat with pride). COCA was built from the ground up by a team of linguists, and Google Ngram is not in the same league.
"Breadth" and "Width" for Measurements
With the figurative use of breadth and width out of the way, let's turn to their use for physical measurements. I was not able to find anything about this in authoritative sources such as dictionaries and handbooks. That's why, in desperation, I turned to my school arithmetic textbook, A School Arithmetic by Hall and Stevens (which was probably my father's school textbook too, because the first edition was published in 1912). I thought (with hindsight, somewhat naively) that they might have used width for small objects (say, a small two-dimensional rectangle smaller than a book page) and breadth for larger objects (such as rooms and gardens). However, as the following page fragment shows, I was wrong. Both "breadth of the room" and "width of the room" are used, and the book also applies the two terms interchangeably to gardens, courtyards, etc. The authors (or their copyeditor) clearly believed that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
Then I found this:
Breadth of 4 inches?
I now knew that I had to go beyond A School Arithmetic (a failed experiment) and see the world. Why spend more time on an antiquated school textbook that is now perhaps a museum piece rather than a textbook?
COCA, here I come!
The Hunt for Real-World Examples in COCA: Searching High and Low
I decided to search COCA to understand how the words breadth and width are used with both small-scale and large-scale measurements. But what should I search for when the target is so open-ended, so nebulous? After a little thought, I came up with a plausible approach: I would look for phrases in which the units mile and inch occurred close to the words breadth and width. "Mile" and "inch" would serve as proxies for large-scale and small-scale measurements, respectively.
Search 1 — I entered the search string "breadth of * miles" in COCA. (From now on, I won't mention that the quotation marks are not part of the search string). The asterisk represents a single word.
One hit!
ACAD was a good sign; it was probably a journal paper. I drilled down by clicking the text.
Nice!
Search 2 — Next, I entered the string "width of * miles". The results were a little unexpected.
Well, well, well!
I drilled down by clicking on the largest width, 118 miles.
The Huffington Post is a well-known name, so that's a good data point. Now, we can drill down further and see more of the surrounding text (COCA calls this the Expanded Context) by clicking any of the three leftmost columns:
So, the subject is the Amazon River. That should be large enough to convince even the most die-hard breadth-for-large-entities proponents.
Search 3 — "Breadth of * * miles" produced one hit in the ACAD category:
Drilling down revealed the sentence fragment and the name of the journal:
I could've drilled down once more to see the expanded context, but now that the bit was firmly wedged between my teeth, I pressed on with the next search.
Search 4a — A search for "width of * * miles" produced two hits, one of which was the Christian Science Monitor:
Search 4b — And "width of * * * miles" yielded this:
This is from Smithsonian, a magazine known for the quality of its writing. The Expanded Context shows—coincidentally enough—that the subject is once again the Amazon River.
Next, I had to search low: I would be hunting phrases with inches occurring close to breadth or width. This time, just for variety and also to flex my COCA search muscles, I decided to use a relatively new COCA feature: variable length searches (flex searches, in COCA lingo).
Search 5a — My first search string was "width of (*){3} inches". This search looks for phrases starting with width, ending with inches, and with permutations of 0 to 3 words (wildcards) between them. This was the result:
Note that only two hits fall in the ACAD category. This is probably because the inch is not an SI unit.
Search 5b — So let's search for a more respectable scientific unit, the millimeter (mm):
These hits are all in the ACAD category.
Search 6 — We now turn to breadth and search for "breadth of (*){3} mm":
The results speak for themselves.
One small quibble about the user interface: "ERROR" is misleading. This is what the user would see if the syntax of the search string were faulty, but that is not the case here: there is no matching record in the corpus, which is not an error. "RESULT" would be a better title than the judgmental "ERROR" for this page.
I'd seen enough—I ended my experiments with COCA here.
The Verdict
This exercise began as an exploration of the usage of breadth and width. At some point, when I'd exhausted the handbooks and usage guides, I realized that I'd have to examine real-world data to base my decision-making on something more reliable and objective than my intuition—or a coin toss. Earlier, I'd have Googled; now, having accumulated some experience in using COCA as a smart assistant in copyediting, I turned to COCA. I'm interested in both language and information technology, and so it's no surprise that I enjoy experimenting with COCA search queries. Needless to say, the conclusions I arrive at from my experiments with COCA should be taken with a big pinch of salt; they are neither gospel truth nor scientific fact. I'm a copyeditor, not a linguist. However, I must mention that it is possible to import search data into a spreadsheet for serious number crunching.
With that caveat out of the way, what did I learn from the breadth versus width showdown? One, breadth has figurative uses that width lacks. Two, it appears that both breadth and width can be used with large-scale measurements; however, it's possible that width should be preferred over breadth for small-scale measurements.
Has the popular association of breadth with large-scale measurements been reinforced by the widely used collocation "length and breadth of," as in "He traveled the length and breadth of the continent"? Here, breadth is indeed exclusively used to describe the span of large entities. However, the fly in the ointment here is the counterexample at the other end of the scale, the equally common "hair's breadth."
Breadth and width (and their adjectival, verb, and adverbial forms) now jump out of the page at me. For example, I see that "the police were given wide powers" is fine.
Here is a sentence I came across recently in a manuscript (as always, the sentence has been disguised for confidentiality): "Female participation in the workforce increased after companies introduced flexible hours and widened remote-work options." Make that "broadened remote-work options" or "expanded remote-work options."
Two Examples of Similar Word Choice Dilemmas
Here are two examples of how similar dilemmas were solved by others, using very different methods. There's an echo of breadth in the following article, which concludes that awakened has a figurative meaning that its synonym awoken lacks:
I found the following article while researching the same problem the author faced: should I use film or movie? I chose movie because the piece I was editing was for the US market. However, note that even if movie is preferred to film, it's filmmaker, not moviemaker, and filmmaking, not moviemaking.
These articles illustrate the types of techniques used to resolve difficult word choice dilemmas. The author of the first article relied on etymology to arrive at a decision, and the author of the second article used hand-crafted surveys, among other tools.
H.L. Mencken wrote: "To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies—the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said—there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident." I submit that juicy word choice dilemmas are a subspecies of verbal delicacy—and an attractive subspecies at that.
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