Statistics and figures

The eighteenth entry is a tendência, and English will not let one word do what this one does. Two are waiting, and they are not interchangeable. « A trend » is what a line does over time: a rising trend, a downward trend, the trend in unemployment. It was an English verb long before it was a noun, since trendan in Old English meant to turn or to roll, so the word carries movement in it and nothing else. « A tendency » arrived much later out of the Latin tendere, to stretch, and it settled on people and on whatever behaves like a person: a tendency to exaggerate, a tendency to seize up, a worrying tendency in the party. It names a disposition, and usually one somebody would rather not have. Put the wrong one on a chart and the sentence changes owner, because « the tendency in the figures » sounds as though the figures had a character. The rule is short: if it is measured, write trend; if it is a habit, write tendency. Note too that only the first has an everyday adjective, « trendy », which has left the numbers behind.