First recorded use of acronym 'UK'

MakeEmLaugh

I've thought about this a lot recently, particularly with the Scottish referendum for independence.

Does anyone know when the earliest recorded use of the term 'UK' was? And I specifically mean 'UK', not 'United Kingdom'.

The earliest I can find is the Sex Pistols song 'Anarchy in the UK' in 1976.

Peregrinus

Oh, it's much older than that.

The Oxford English Dictionary has a cite from 1892: Daily News 27 October 1892 - "The supplies at sea for U.K. have decreased 32,000 quarters on the week... Supplies at sea for U.K. have further slightly decreased." I would have thought that its headline-friendly brevity would have made it a journalistic staple from quite early on.

MakeEmLaugh

Peregrinus wrote: »

Oh, it's much older than that.

The Oxford English Dictionary has a cite from 1892: Daily News 27 October 1892 - "The supplies at sea for U.K. have decreased 32,000 quarters on the week... Supplies at sea for U.K. have further slightly decreased." I would have thought that its headline-friendly brevity would have made it a journalistic staple from quite early on.

It seems GB or Britain was used a lot more commonly until the last few decades of the 20th century.

tac foley

However, 'Great Britain' only refers to the three countries on the larger of the islands. It is a hark-back to the use in Roman times of the term GreatER Britain to distinguish it from Lesser Britain - now called Brittany in NW France.

tac

mrcheez

tac foley wrote: »

However, 'Great Britain' only refers to the three countries on the larger of the islands. It is a hark-back to the use in Roman times of the term GreatER Britain to distinguish it from Lesser Britain - now called Brittany in NW France.

tac

This I did not know. Thanks for that

Peregrinus

"Britain" comes from the Latin Brittania, which in turn comes from a Greek word Prittanike which in turn comes from the name one of the Celtic tribes had for themselves. We don't know exactly what this name was, but it was probably something line Pritan, Pritani.

The Greek word referred to all the places where the Celts lived - Celt-land, if you will. It covered Britain, Ireland, all the surrounding Islands, and much of France. The island we know as Britain they knew as Albion.

For the Romans, Britannia initially had the same extended meaning, which is why the large island and the province in north-west France both had the same name. Later, Britannia became the name of the Roman colony, which of course stopped at Hadrian's wall. Britannia Magna ("Big Britain" or "Great Britain") then came into use to refer either to (a) the whole island, or (b) the whole area inhabited by Celtic tribes.

With the collapse of the Roman province of Britannia the name was freed up, so to speak, and there was a period of variable use in which Britannia or Britannia Parva ("Little Britain") could refer to (a) Brittany, (b) Wales or even (c) Ireland, though Ireland was (confusingly) more normally called Scotia by Latin speakers at this time.

The meaning stabilised differently in different languages. The English derived from Britannia is "Britain"; "Britain" and "Great Britain" are synonymous; the both refer to the large island. The corresponding Irish word, "Breatain" is either the large island or the French province, depending on context, and "Breatain Bheag" is Wales. In French, "Bretagne " is the French province and "Grande-Bretagne" is the large island. In Welsh "Prydain" is the whole island, but "Prydyn" refers to the Picts, a Celtic tribe mainly associated with Scotland and parts of Ulster.