Think revising for exams is hard? After scoring pretty well on the IELTS test, I thought I knew my English pretty well. After one week in the UK, I found out I was terribly mistaken. Some English words in the UK, have meanings quite different from the ones I knew. Consider the following words:

Cheers: I thought meant something to do with cheering, cheer leaders, like for a sports team. In the UK, cheers is another word for thank you, used especially because it’s smaller, and as we know, smaller is always better. Cheers, mate!

Cheeky: I thought meant something related to cheeks. For example, a baby could be lovingly called “he’s so cheeky” if he had nice, big cheeks. In the UK, being cheeky means being rude. Now where did that come from?

Funny:  a very common and simple word, yet perhaps the most confusing of all UK English vocabulary. All over the world, something that is “funny” is something to laugh at. Not so in the UK. In the UK, it occasionally means laughable and more often than not means something else.  Consider:

Not being funny: does not mean being serious. Rather it means not complaining, moaning, grumbling….

A funny mood: does not mean the person is cracking jokes. It means he’s in a really bad mood.

That’s not even funny: surprisingly, this phrase does not mean “hey, that wasn’t worth laughing at”. Rather it means "quit playing around with me”

From David on his first year in the UK from Pakistan