Save Your "Regards" for Broadway

Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the Copyediting newsletter, offers useful tips to copy editors and anyone else who prizes clear and orderly writing. Here she illuminates the proper usage of the surprisingly tricky word "regard."

Our written language is growing less formal. We use you instead of one when we're talking about people in general, the subjunctive is dying out, and few people bother to use whom, except when they shouldn't use it. As this casual register becomes more common, so too do errors in the use of more formal forms of language. People tend to use words and phrases they recognize as formal when they want to sound more authoritative, but they often make mistakes because they so seldom use these expressions.

The noun regard is a good example. It's a formal and fairly old-fashioned synonym for gaze, as in "His regard fell upon the waif in the gutter." This is technically a countable use, meaning you could talk about more than one aristocrat and say "Their regards fell upon the waif in the gutter." But this form is hardly ever found in the plural.

You can also use regard to mean 'respect' or 'esteem', as in "I hold her in high regard." We can say we hold someone in low regard, too, although this is much less common; regard in this sense is nearly always used with high, almost like a fixed expression. In this sense, regard is uncountable: you can't have five or ten regards.

In another uncountable sense, regard is a synonym for care, as in "He shows little regard for anyone else's time and effort." A less formal way of putting this would be "He doesn't care much about anyone else's time and effort." Regard isn't often used incorrectly in this sense.

But it is used incorrectly all the time in the phrases "in regards to" and "with regards to." Regard should be singular here; the phrases, which mean 'respecting' or 'concerning' or 'with respect to', make use of the uncountable sense of regard that means 'attention'. Yet people frequently use the plural form instead of writing "in regard to" and "with regard to." The problem is that another expression is interfering, namely "as regards."

"As regards" means 'concerning', too, and for the most part it is interchangeable with "in regard to" and "with regard to." All of them mean "as for such and such," and really, you're better off saying as for or regarding most of the time. (Did you know, by the way, that the abbreviation Re in a memo header is for the word regarding?) But the expression "as regards" does not use the uncountable noun. It uses the singular form of the verb to regard, as shorthand for "Now, as for the way in which we must consider (regard) the following..."

The only expression in which the noun regard is used in the plural with any frequency at all is in the sense of 'good wishes', which is in fact always plural. So you can give your regards to Broadway, you can send your friend's mother your best regards, you can sign a letter with Regards. But if you're tempted to say "with regards to" or "in regards to," mentally substitute respect for regards, which might help you remember to change regards to the singular regard.

Wendalyn Nichols is the editor of the Copyediting newsletter and a commissioning editor of dictionaries for Cambridge University Press. She began as a freelance researcher, writer, and editor, then became a lexicographer and editor with the Longman Group. For four years she was the editorial director of Random House Reference and Information Publishing. She lives in New York, New York with her husband and young daughter. Follow her on Twitter @WendalynNichols and @Copyediting.