It certainly does seem to be the case that
spillover appears in print much more often than
overspill. And those who say they've never encountered
spillover may perhaps have seen it without registering it. Just yesterday I saw it in the opening sentence of a
blog post by economist Tyler Cowen about a forthcoming book:
One theme of Stubborn Attachments is that economic growth in the wealthier countries has positive spillover effects for poorer individuals around the world.
And the Newspaper here, the Melbourne
Age has 664 instances in its index. Many of them are business related:
There's a concept in economics called "spillover effects".
It's when one action has an impact – either positive or negative – on something seemingly unrelated.
But there are other contexts too:
"The idea is to create an independent 'voice' on this side of the building, whether this space is used for informal concerts and/or spillover for outdoor dining," says Leslie.
A "spillover event", where a virus finds a way to survive in a new host, could happen at any time, with terrible consequences. Ebola was a spillover event, from bats to humans.
The "loyal, high-value consumer" of international brands also helped create a spillover effect into other departments, such as cosmetics and homewares, Ms Brewster said.
In the cautious language of scientific "never say never" the CSIRO says of its experiments: "These results strongly suggest that both spillover infections and species jumps are highly unlikely".
The only strikes Israel had been willing to acknowledge carrying out were those against Syrian positions near the frontier on the Golan Heights in retaliation for spillover from the Syrian civil war into Israeli-occupied territory.
The same newspaper has only 51 hits for
overspill. A similar preponderance of
spillover is found in large global corpora. For example the News on the Web corpus:
overspill = 456,
spillover = 4987.
It's true that
spillover doesn't appear so often in fiction - though there are some examples - but I feel it pops up often enough in non-fiction and news reporting that it warrants being classed as common. And I agree with TRex that the current situation is the wrong way around:
overspill should be classed as rare.
