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Our proofreader, a native speaker of American English, just won't let me use this word. Every single time I try to sneak it onto one of our sites, she replaces it with three times. Now, I do realize that thrice is quirky, but how quirky is it really? Is it awfully archaic? Is there a chance that native speakers won't understand it at all?

I know I could just search a corpus or five, but I don't feel like looking at cold stats (or the Wiktionary usage notes, for that matter). Instead, I am asking members of this community for their very personal, highly subjective, extremely biased opinions.

tchrist
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RegDwigнt
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    Bah on your proofreader. Thrice is a lovely word, and you shouldn't be forced to change away from it. – JSBձոգչ Nov 25 '10 at 05:13
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    Thrice is beautiful. I use it wherever possible. – Pekka Nov 25 '10 at 14:42
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    I try to use it thrice a day. – Kosmonaut Nov 25 '10 at 15:21
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    BTW, is your question "How common is 'thrice' in American English"? Because it's fairly common at least in India (and presumably in the UK); I even remember an old TV programme where someone was complaining about the rising idiosyncrasy of using "three times" instead of "thrice". – ShreevatsaR Nov 25 '10 at 20:22
  • @ShreevatsaR: Feel free to turn your comment into an answer. I didn't expressly limit the question to AE (and used the more general "dialects" tag) precisely because I had no idea whether it was just our proofreader, all speakers of her dialect, all Americans, or absolutely everybody in the whole wide world but me. – RegDwigнt Nov 25 '10 at 22:54
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    @Kosmonaut: thwack. :p – Marthaª Dec 01 '10 at 00:12
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    @JSBangs: Depending on the context though, the proofreader may be doing a favour... in the case where you don't want to sound too pretentious. – Noldorin Jan 23 '11 at 21:17
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    Once, twice, thrice a lady ... Hmmm. – bib Jul 20 '14 at 16:23
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    http://teamcoco.com/content/campaign-make-thrice-cool-word

    It's good enough for Conan...

     – KnightHawk Aug 06 '14 at 15:50
  • Using "thrice" is not really wrong, but it has really faded out. Few people use it today. It was commonly seen in Shakespeare's works and the King James Bible, though. – Victor Apr 14 '21 at 08:48

8 Answers8

11

Thrice is somewhat common in America, but is generally considered pretentious.

Sometimes it’s used in a quirky sense by regular folks, but as Flotsam related, thrice is used throughout the older translations of the Bible. So many Americans may not use or understand it outside of that context.

tchrist
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Esteban
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    Agreed. I use thrice, but I also enjoy using whence and those kinds of words. Definitely pretentious. If your sites are aimed at the general population and therefore you want to keep more to at least a lower common denominator, I'd avoid thrice. – Dusty Nov 25 '10 at 04:42
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    I think one should add that though it may be perceived as being pretentious, it is not necessarily used pretentiously. (Note my pretentious use of 'one' :) – Benjol Nov 25 '10 at 06:24
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    Do you have a citation for "generally considered pretentious"? I know the questioner didn't ask for it, but I'm just curious… this seems really strange to me; "thrice" is a perfectly commonplace word where I come from. – ShreevatsaR Nov 25 '10 at 21:55
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    I don't know how easy it is to find a citation for "thrice" being pretentious, but as a fellow American I can confirm that it generally gives that impression here. – Kosmonaut Nov 26 '10 at 06:02
  • The choice in America on this word seems to be "pretentious" or "dumbed-down"; I know which I would pick. – Orbling Dec 01 '10 at 00:15
  • Just to add to this, thrice is also considered pretentious in Britain these days (unless you're upper-class). It's used from time to time though. – Noldorin Jan 23 '11 at 16:41
  • (In fact, it's disproportionally used by foreigners in my experience, who are not aware that it is considered pretentious.) – Noldorin Jan 23 '11 at 16:42
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    Or by Brits who want to sound British to an American audience, on the grounds that we're then expected to sound a bit pretentious. ;) – ijw Jan 31 '11 at 13:26
  • @Benjol Did you just close an opening bracket with a smiley face? – Lotus Notes Jun 17 '11 at 22:26
  • @Lotus, I did; it hurts my eyes less than the alternative. There's a question about that, if you wondered :) – Benjol Jun 18 '11 at 13:01
  • It's three times. Duh! ;) – Dan Bron Aug 06 '14 at 16:35
6

Thrice can be used but should be followed by a word. For example, thrice married, thrice divorced, etc. You should not say something like: "I had to go to the store thrice." The proper way is three times.

Mari-Lou A
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ray
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5

The only instance I can think of when someone used thrice on TV was when Mr. Burns, who is often portrayed using out-of-date language, uses the word thrice in this passage:

All right, Simpson, let’s go over the signals. If I tug the bill of my cap like so, it means the signal is a fake. However, I can take that off by dusting my hands thusly. If I want you to bunt, I will touch my belt buckle not once, not twice, but thrice. If I tug this here. . . .

This is intentionally used by the writers because it sounds funny to the viewers, even though they understand it. I’d say that in Canadian English for sure, and in all the American English I've heard on TV and in person, people generally don’t use the word thrice.

Oxford Dictionaries Online says that thrice is

chiefly formal or literary

And Google n-grams shows that twice is far more popular than two times and "three times" is far more popular than thrice.

enter image description here

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇
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  • You really shouldn't be comparing the frequency of "twice" and "thrice"; that's meaningless as you observed. – ShreevatsaR Nov 25 '10 at 21:49
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    BTW: IMDB search. Shows it's quite often used in movies and on TV (if you ignore the weird duplicates on the first page). E.g., it's used in Pirates of the Caribbean, Kung Fu Panda, Doctor Who, etc. — and these are only the "memorable" quotes. – ShreevatsaR Nov 25 '10 at 21:54
  • you may be able to make a twice/thrice comparison if you can make some assumption on the distribution of x2 and x3 numbers, perhaps benfords law? – jk. Jan 24 '11 at 15:25
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    @jk: Bendford's law, if indeed it is relevant here, suggests that "twice" should occur 1.409 times more often as "thrice" by numbers alone. So correcting for that influence COCA's numbers would suggest that "twice" is intrinsically ~92 times more common than "thrice", instead of the ~129 times of the raw count. – Charles May 09 '11 at 20:40
  • I happen to use thrice as a normal word, favoring it over three times, so it does not come off as “pretentious” to my donnish ear. However, I cannot help but observe that Mr Burns’ use of thusly was surely put there for for its overwhelming hypercorrective silliness. In other words, as a mark of pretentiousness. (Pretention? Pretence?) – tchrist Dec 26 '12 at 23:41
  • If it's used in Pirates of the Caribbean, Kung Fu Panda, Doctor Who and The Simpsons, surely that proves something. – Edwin Ashworth Dec 26 '12 at 23:45
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    Pirates of the Caribbean is not a very good example, though—they use phrases such as, “It would strain credulity, at that!”, which I would hardly put down as being in common usage. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 21 '13 at 15:27
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In fundamentalist Christian circles, thrice is relatively common.

I hear or read the phrase thrice holy in reference to God probably three times a year. I go to church about three times a week.

I never hear or read it outside of that context.

tchrist
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Captain Claptrap
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4

A New York Times search reveals it is fairly common in the US. I also tried with the Guardian (a UK paper) and with Australian and Indian papers. It is fairly common — in my opinion.

tchrist
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knight17
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I use thrice periodically. I've found that in practice, however, some listeners think I've said "twice", as the two rhyme.

RegDwigнt
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Glenn Jørstad Jakobsen
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My gut instinct as a British English speaker is that if you used thrice, it would be assumed that you'd used it for some special rhetorical/poetic effect, or you were being pretentious (or both). It's non-standard and not colloquial.

I'd hazard a guess that the majority of uses of the word are in a larger expression along the lines of "not once, not twice, but thrice", and rarely by itself.

I'll stick my neck out and say that Australians would be more likely to think it pretentious.

gpr
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    Thrice is “non-standard” Really?? – tchrist Dec 26 '12 at 23:41
  • Perhaps a poor choice of words, depending on what you take 'non-standard' to mean. By that, I meant it is not commonly used. Commonly understood, of course, but not used. And sure enough, the OED notes it as 'formal or literary' – gpr Dec 28 '12 at 09:04
  • I'd agree that it's not colloquial any more. It's not quite as antiquated as thruppence, but it's getting on that way. And yes, I was an adult before we stopped using 3d coins and I still use fewer. – BoldBen Aug 27 '17 at 15:41
  • I dunno - thruppence is doomed because we don't have those coins anymore, and you can't buy much of use for 3p, whereas you'll always be able do things three times and be a bit fancy about how you say it ;) – gpr Nov 03 '17 at 06:27
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Thrice was not too obscure to be used in the hit musical comedy and the movie A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
enter image description here

You can find the memorable quote featuring thrice here

Philia: That's the brute who raped my country, Thrace!

Pseudolus: He raped Thrace?

Philia: And then he came and did it again! And then again!

Pseudolus: He raped Thrace thrice?

Pseudolus was played by Zero Mostel (right, in picture; Phil Silvers at left). Picture -- from homevideos.com The OP asked for our

very personal, highly subjective, extremely biased opinions

and mine is that if I say thrice and the person I am talking to does not immediately think of this quote, then the heck with him.

ab2
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