The Difference Between Instantly and Instantaneously

Hello, you have a wave with words.

Hello, this is Rachel from Oceanside.

Hi, Rachel. How are you doing?

I’m doing well. How are you, Grant?

Groovy. What’s on your mind today?

Well, I have a friend named Corinne, and we’re sort of word nerds together.

Yay!

And we were curious about the words instantly and instantaneously.

I’ve done a little bit of research, and I can tell that there’s a grammatical difference, but I can’t seem to find anywhere where it tells me exactly where one would be used over the other.

I think that would be my question.

That’s the kind of dilemma that only word nerds ever come up with, because other people don’t think that closely about language, do they?

And do you and your friend disagree about it, Rachel?

Well, it’s not so much that we disagree about it, but we can’t seem to agree on anything in particular.

Our feeling is that instantly refers to one thing happening all of a sudden, and possibly instantaneously refers to a number of things that all happen at once.

But like I said, I can’t really find anything to confirm that.

So we’re just sort of stipulating by ourselves.

Well, Rachel, I mean, really, I think the distinction between those two words is one of those distinctions that’s sort of finer than frog hair split four ways, as we say.

Oh, my goodness.

You know, I mean, well, think about it this way.

If you have a really bad headache and you take a pill, do you want it to work instantly or instantaneously?

I would say I wanted it to work instantly.

Interesting.

You know, I think that this is just a really, really, really fine distinction because I think I would want it to work instantaneously, and I’m not quite sure why.

Maybe we should have a race.

I think what you’re saying is there’s not a great deal of difference between the two.

They can be used interchangeably, and any perceived difference between the two is insignificant.

Okay, so if anyone corrects me, I can tell them they’re wrong.

I don’t think you’re ever going to get anyone to correct you.

I don’t think people are—again, like I say, I think congratulations to the word nerds because you’re thinking about something that most people probably haven’t considered and will never consider.

Maybe there’s a reason.

Well, no, this is how you get better language.

This is how you speak better and write better, by thinking about the blocks of language and how it’s all put together.

I will say, though, that if you look at these two words in a large body of English that’s a corpus of English, you’ll find some interesting things here.

We tend to use the two most common words used with the word instantly are regretted and recognizable.

Yes, and both of those were used as examples.

Oh, really?

Exactly, and that’s why they use them as examples because that’s more than half the time when we use the word instantly, we’re either instantly regretting or we’re instantly recognizing.

And then with instantaneously, the far out in front, like something like three quarters of the time, we use the word almost with it, almost instantaneously.

So when we use it most often, we’re not actually talking about true instantaneously.

We’re talking about something a little longer or a little further away than instantaneously.

It’s just kind of an interesting thing that we have these habits as English speakers, a way of further separating the two words in our minds so that even though they are by definition the same in use, we do different things with them.

Kind of like taking one car to the beach and one car to work, right?

Sure. Okay, so it’s more contextual than it is really anything else.

Mm—

All right. Well, I will instantly be letting my friend know that there’s absolutely no difference.

As far as it goes, there’s no difference. That’s right.

Okay, well, great. Thank you guys so much.

Thank you, Rachel. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Have a good day.

Well, if you’d like instantaneous gratification about a language question, I don’t know, Grant. I think instantaneous to me seems faster.

Well, it is faster, but think about it.

Sometimes this word is going to sound, one word is going to sound more natural than another, and that’s the one that you’re going to pick.

And so the difference here is your habit and not actually the meaning of the word, because the meaning, again, between the two is indistinguishable.

So it’s just a matter of context.

If you have a question about language, you can get instantaneous gratification right here at 1-877-929-9673.

Or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.