Sometimes when rushing through a puzzle app, swiping words so quickly, the actual words can become a blur. I am used to telling Anne about alternate American/English versions of words, like COLOR (Am) vs COLOUR (Eng) and NITER (Am) vs NITRE (Eng). So I got into a blur where I ended up thinking BYRE and BIER were the same word, just different dialect spellings.
But no, a BYRE is a shed for a cow, and a BIER is a typically wooden platform for carrying the dead. So, if you have cattle, you can get them into the BYRE, but if you have a corpse or coffin to carry to a gravesite, a BIER would be the thing.
In German, BIER is just BEER.
And while swiping those letters, I misspelled BIER as BRIE, which is a soft spreadable cheese, like cream cheese. I can't remember the last time I actually had some, but I seem to recall it looked like cream cheese but tasted skunky and awful.
Here is another case where two words differ in American/British meaning based on an extra E: STORY and STOREY. You can tell a STORY, it's a piece of narration or fiction, or a news story. I don't normally think of it as a verb, but it can be. I would normally say I was telling a STORY, but I could be STORYING. Having finished the STORY, I suppose I am all STORIED out. But, STORIED fits as an adjective too: if many stories have been told about you, you have lived a STORIED life. STOREY is a floor in a house, and to make matters a little more complex, in the British Isles, what we call the first floor (Am) is the ground floor and our second floor is their first storey (floor). A taller building could have multiple STOREYS. Merriam-Webster says that this STOREY is just a less common version of STORY, but it always felt to me like a specifically British version. Cambridge has STOREYED, which would be used as an adjective, as in "a three-storeyed ho...
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