I believe that last week I discovered an error that's been in plain sight for hundreds of years. Every English dictionary I can find lists 'versus' as a preposition, and I think it isn't, at least not typically.

If it were a preposition, you should commonly see sentences like: 

-Versus the bears, the lions are four and ten.
-Tonight, the lions are versus the bears.
-The lions have done poorly versus the bears and versus the hawks.

All of these can be found, but their frequency is vanishingly rare. On the other hand, you should not see phrases like:

-male versus female versus no gender
-happy versus sad
-up the tree versus along the fence
-verbally versus symbolically

But they are not so uncommon. This suggests that 'versus' is, at least usually, a coordinating conjunction and not, or almost never, a preposition.

I don't suppose this really matters very much, except that it should remind us that even basic facts of English are not always well described.

Best,
Brett

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Brett Reynolds
English Language Centre
Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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