Roster/rostered

[Morbius]

From yesterday's Challenge puzzle:  Roster - common, rostered - rare.  That seems odd to me.  Surely if you know the word roster, you'd also know rostered.  Both should be common, I think.

[mkenuk]

It seems common enough to me;

COD, however, labels the verb ' (to) roster' as 'British'
That's possibly the reason.

[Jacki]

I think I've brought this up before too. Straight away I played rostered and it was rare. I was surprised. Here we say "He was rostered on today," or "Who is rostered on next?", for a work situation.

[Ozzyjack]

Has anything changed since Alan last dealt with it?

Over the years we've had several discussions of roster vs rota, but the common/rare status of rostered, and by implication, rostering, hasn't come up before.

It seems fairly clear that roster as a verb is more common in Britain than in the US. In fact, the verb isn't even listed in the online Merriam-Webster, or in the American Heritage dictionary. But what's even more striking is how much more often the word rostered is used in Australia, New Zealand and Ireland than anywhere else. Here is a chart from the Corpus of Global Web-based English, GloWbE:



The pattern is similar in the News on the Web corpus:


So, it's no wonder some of our Australian forumites are astonished the word is not considered common. But it seems it's much less common in a lot of other places.

I think rostered should remain as rare.

[ridethetalk]

It seems common enough to me;

COD, however, labels the verb ' (to) roster' as 'British'
That's possibly the reason.

I'm with you, Mike

[Alan W]

I don't imagine anything has changed from when I looked at this last year. Rostered will remain as rare.