Any difference between CEMETERY and GRAVEYARD?

Mario Rinvolucri, Pilgrims, UK

When this question occurred to me I remembered a TV programme about how the graveyards round the churches in central London began "overflowing" as they buried more and more people on top of each other in the same trench. It was then, faced with a population explosion, that London built its first "cemeteries" round the edge of the city and away from churches. This happened mid 19th century but it took some time for worthy Victorian burghers to agree to bury their dead in distant, unhallowed and non-traditional places.

So, historically, in UK at least, graveyards are round the church and cemeteries on the edge of town. I then wondered if the same sort of distinction could be made between the Italian camposanto ( ground holy) and cimitero. Maybe an Italian reader will write and enlighten me.

And what about the etymology of the two words? While graveyard seems pretty clear Onions, in the Oxford Etymological Dictionary, has this to say about cemetery: " burial-ground XIV- late Latin coemeterium (whence also Fr cimetiere) Greek koimeterion ( in Christian writers burial-ground ) from koiman put to sleep.

Since Oxford only deals with the secondary form of the language,the written code, this entry makes clear that the word cemetery popped up in some text as early as the 14th century( Western century reckoning). Did the top people at that time talk about cemeteries, and the others about graveyards…? I have no idea.

And what about my native speaker associations.

1. I have never been to a funeral in a graveyard…..so I associate the senseless snuffing out of human life with the word cemetery.
2. When I think of cemetery I think of chapel of remembrance and of crematorium and I see long rows of immaculately tended graves. When graveyard comes to mind I smell nettles and see crumbling, weather-beaten headstones.

After all this personal rambling I thought I would go to what Michael Rundell, writing in HLT May 2000, called The biggest corpus of them all, that is to say Google and this is what I found:

Cemetery: 25 million references

Graveyard: 6.6 million references.

Selected occurences of cemetery

Selected occurences of graveyard

Conclusions and questions stemming from the above exercise:

- Cemetery, with more than four times more occurences than graveyard, is the signifier for a current reality and is our normal word for burial-ground.
- Graveyard seems to have wandered of, mostly, into the land of metaphor, with phrases like a space craft in a graveyard orbit. My guess is that, way back, it used designate a real corpse-ground.
- Using Google as your corpus leaves you with a strong North American taste in your
- voice box. US dwellers are the majority native speaking group of English users in the world and they have been internetting much longer than the Brits.

Using Google as you corpus is better than using a linguist-controlled corpus, because it is not subject to their freaky decisions. It was John Sinclair who very honestly declared that there can be no science involved in choosing what to input to a corpus.

Google allows linguistic peasants like me some common land to hunt on, and at the click of mouse, and makes the high walls the "enclosure" capitalists have built round their private estates, their dedicated corpora, like Cancode ( CUP) feel a little less barbed-wire topped. Peasants, too, can enjoy the corpus revolution.

Please check the The English for Teachers course at Pilgrims website.