Situation:
You have a meeting scheduled at 10am but it’s now 10:15 already. You go to the meeting room and you see the door is already closed – oops, the meeting has started already. You knock, quietly open the door and of course you feel you need to say something:
「Sorry for late.」 And take a seat.
Well, I’m sure you』ve had similar experiences before. I’m not here to say that you should never be late – I mean, things happen and sometimes it’s just beyond our control. Especially at work when you have to attend one meeting after another.
What I do want to talk about is what we should say in these situations. The phrase 『Sorry for late』 actually sounds strange.
Why? It’s grammatically incorrect.
You may remember I mentioned before that one of the key grammar points in oral English is knowing the 『part of speech/word class』 of the word. Whether it’s a noun, adjective, adverb because it will dictate how we can use this word.
First, let’s look at the word 『late』. From the dictionary it tells us it is an adjective and an adverb. So it needs to be next to either a noun or a verb.
Now, let’s look at the phrase 『Sorry for…』, usually what do we use after the 『for』? We either follow it with a noun or a verb phrase.
Ex 1. Sorry for the late reply. (noun).
Ex 2. Sorry for disturbing you. (verb phrase).
So that means 『Sorry for late』 doesn’t really work because it’s missing something grammatically.
In the scenario here, you have a few options. You can say:
Any of these phrases are grammatically correct and suitable in these situations. There’s never only ONE way to say something in real life so you』ll see I provide you with a few options to choose from.
EXCEPT this option:
『Sorry for late.』
Thanks for reading.
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