When I was younger, I never really paid attention to the usages of “waiting”, because they were so intuitive. But in recent years I’ve been jarred into thinking about it.
In other words: To me, “waiting on” is similar to “working for”. It’s used for waiters and waitresses, and never any other time. All other cases of waiting are “waiting for”. I can be waiting for a friend, waiting for a tv show to begin, or waiting for my tax refund. I would not be waiting “on” any of these. Yet I’ve seen and heard “waiting on” in these contexts many times in the last five years or so.
So here’s my question: I’m from the NY-NJ area. Is this a regional thing that has recently gone national? Or are there other New Yorkers older than 40 who have always used “waiting on” this way?
You mean…“We’re going to the movies, we’re just waiting on Billy to get here.”? I’m in upstate NY, and I do hear it phrased like this occasionally by my backwoods friends. The majority of people say “waiting for”. A quick google search says that it is mostly a Southeastern thing.
Raised in Saskatchewan, lived in Vancouver for years, now in Texas.
“Waiting on” tables/customers is completely different from the sense of “passing time until [some event]”.
In my experience, “waiting for [something]” implies that [something] is expected at some time in the future, but there’s no particular hurry or importance, while “waiting on [something]” implies some sort of urgency or immediate requirement for a particular purpose.
I’ve always used waiting for, and that’s all I ever heard until I moved from Chicago to Indiana. That’s when I heard waiting on for the first time. Now that I’m back in northern Illinois, I expect that I won’t hear waiting on very often, if at all.