A thread at the language forum Pain in the English discusses the expression all of a sudden and two apparent variants:
- all of the sudden
- all the sudden
As this Ngram graph shows, all of a sudden has long been the standard version, but apparently the second version is used to a certain extent in North America, and somebody suggested that the third is used in the North of England (although I can find no evidence of that).
This doesn't seem to be a particularly big issue, as neither Burchfield's third edition of Fowler, or the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage have anything to say about it. It's enough of an issue, though, for Bryan Garner, in Garner's Modern American Usage, to write:
all of a sudden. This is the phrase, not *all of the sudden—e.g.: “I wasn't thinking of anything, but all of the sudden [read all of a sudden] I was no longer tired.” Sam Brumbaugh, Goodbye, Goodness: A Novel 108 (2005).
LANGUAGE-CHANGE INDEX
*all of the sudden for all of a sudden: Stage 1
*all of the sudden for all of a sudden: Stage 1
But that little seventeenth-century bump for all of the sudden, plus the discovery that all on a sudden gave all of a sudden quite a run for
its money in the first half of the eighteenth century, made me interested to find out more about how this idiom began. And have some fun with the Google Books clip function at the same time.
