The only thing worse than not knowing the English word for something is knowing two words for (apparently) the same thing: while in the first instance, you simply need to look the word up, and your online dictionary will point you in the right direction, in the second, you have that terrible feeling of uncertainty: “Am I saying house when I should really say home? Is it too or also? Is there a difference between let and allow?” Sometimes there’s a subtle difference in meaning that your own language doesn’t register; sometimes there’s just a difference of permitted word order; sometimes it’s a matter of structure (allow requires to before the following verb; let doesn’t. Let can’t generally be used in the passive). Few common pairs of similar words cause students as much difficulty as job and work.
As criminal psychologists do, I like to approach such troublemakers – hoping to understand them – by looking at their background histories. While work has solid Old English ancestry, however, (weorc, for the Anglo-Saxons, meant, generally, something that someone does or did), nobody seems sure about where job – which first appeared in the 16th Century – comes from. The only available explanation – which doesn’t completely convince anyone – is that it comes from the medieval word gobbe, meaning a lump, or a solid single unit. I think we should just say “ok, yes, that’s it” to this, and ignore the etymologists’ doubts, as it helps us understand the main difference between work and job, which is that work is uncountable and job is countable.
Nouns, broadly speaking, are words that represent either things or stuff. Countable nouns [things] (like boy, fridge, question or headache) have a plural form, and, when singular, can be preceded by ‘a’ or ‘an’; uncountable nouns [stuff] (water, energy, unemployment) behave like singular countable nouns, but without ‘a’/ ‘an’; they have no plural form, because they increase not by multiplying but by getting bigger. Some English words surprise learners by being uncountable – paper, information, advice, news, money, spaghetti – when their equivalents in the learner’s language are countable. For us these nouns represent an undefined, limitless mass, until we quantify them by using another, countable, noun (a piece of paper, a huge amount of money, 2 bits of information, 3 items of news, 4 kilos of spaghetti).
Other words trick you by being uncountable in one situation and countable in another: chicken is singular/plural in the farmyard (“the 4 chickens have all laid eggs today”) and uncountable at the dinner table (“Would you like some more chicken?”); coffee is uncountable in the supermarket (“half a kilo of coffee, please”) and countable in the café (“2 coffees, please”). Memory is uncountable for your computer (“2GB of memory, not much memory left”) but countable for you (“a childhood memory; such happy memories!”) Work and job, on the other hand, split the work between them, or, if you prefer, have one job each: if you employ someone, you give them some work, or a job. So the idea of a job (countable, thing) as a gobbe or “lump” of work (uncountable, stuff) is quite helpful.
At work can mean two things: it can be a synonym for “working” – “he was hard at work, writing his novel” – or it can refer to a location, someone’s active presence at their place of work - “my mum’s at work; my dad’s at home” – as it does when we talk about driving to work or coming back from work. In these expressions, work needs no determiner (see my article on “One” if you need to be reminded what a determiner is), like school, university, hospital or prison, when we refer to people being in, going to, or coming from, those places, as pupils, students, patients or convicts, respectively.
The word work can, in fact, also be countable, but only when it refers a “piece of artistic / creative production”: a work of art, the complete works of Shakespeare, Bach’s organ works (this last is a cd title, not a medical report). If we’re talking about something that someone has done that isn’t considered to be artistic, we’ll only use the uncountable work – “this looks like it was the work of professional thieves.”
Even more confusingly, the word works has another, separate meaning, which anyone who has ever played English Monopoly will recognize: an industrial complex, including the buildings and machinery – as in Water Works (you might also hear this phrase used, humorously, to describe someone crying – “she turned on the water works!”) But is works actually plural? Well, that’s not an easy question to answer: it depends on whether you use the example of this Wikipedia entry – “The Seaton Iron Works were set up in 1862…” or this one: “The Tredegar Iron Works was a historic iron works in Richmond, Virginia…” A Google search shows that there are equal numbers of examples of “…iron works was…”, and “…iron works were…” – about a half a million each - so I would suggest that you could defend either choice.
Works (plural) can also refer to the mechanism, or working parts of a machine, giving us the common idiom to describe an action that causes disruption or chaos – to “throw a spanner in the works”.From this usage we also get a common idiomatic expression: the works, meaning a complete, comprehensive service or performance from which nothing has been left out: “He had a complete beauty treatment – facial scrub, manicure, pedicure, the works!”
Work occupies over eight pages of my edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, so I’m afraid I haven’t given you the works
this week – I haven’t even touched on work as a verb yet: when I do, including idioms and phrasal verbs, I’ll have a challenge on my hands: in other words, I’ll have my work cut out…
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