Xerox vs. photocopy?

[frank]

There are people who hypercorrect the word xerox saying that it should be photocopy since the former is a brand name. And when you show them that even old dictionaries in the 80's have already incorporated the xerox as a verb, they would say that natives [Americans and Brits] still say photocopy most of the time. How true?

[Yankee]

Hi Frank

It's been years and years since I last used "xerox" as a verb. But I don't usually say "photocopy", either. Instead I usually just talk about a "copy machine" and I would say "make a copy/copies".

Amy
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Amy
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ESL teacher, translator, and a native speaker of American English

[Jamie (K)]

I still say xerox as a verb, unless for some reason I'm trying not to use the brand name. Personally, I don't think people should be obligated to preserve companies' trademarks for them, so I feel perfectly comfortable using kleenex, bandaid, scotch tape and other brand names as generic terms.

I don't think there's any one term most Americans use for photocopying most of the time. Some people say xerox, some people just say copy, frequently people say run off copies. People also do say "photocopy", but I wouldn't make the leap of saying that native speakers say it most of the time. It's got too many syllables.

One of the weirdest things I've ever seen is when I pass out a xeroxed handout to my American students and they call it a "ditto". A ditto is a copy made by an old alcohol-based process that mostly went out of use in the late 1960s, and people old enough to have seen them can remember their very special, pleasant smell. My students were not born yet when dittos went out of use, and most of their teachers might not have been old enough to remember dittos that well. However, many of them still call photocopies that a teacher gives them dittos!