Brit in American English? [duplicate]

Solution 1:

The following extract from the Grammarist can be helpful:

Briton is the most widely accepted term for people from Britain (which of course is not the same as England and the United Kingdom). Britisher had a brief heyday in the 20th century, but it was always only an American term and was never accepted by Britons themselves. Brit is not offensive, but it is informal.

Of these words, Brit appears most often because it serves as both a noun and an adjective, and probably also because it’s short and not a homophone with Britain. Briton is only a noun, and it only denotes people. Britain is always the correct spelling of the place name.

GDoS shows AmE usage of Brit from early 20th century:

1901 [US] Blackwood’s 169 453: They said; ‘the Brit is at his old game : let us give him time, and smash him [...] as we did at Magersfonteiname .

Solution 2:

"Brit" was formerly an offensive word (Wiktionary). The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary tells us that it is informal and can sound negative.

"Brit" is a word that as an adjective and/or a noun preceded by the indefinite article (a Brit) shows a sharp decline in its frequency of use in the fourth part of the 20th century, while over the same period there is a rise of the plural noun preceded by the definite article (the Brits); that can be read into this ngram.

This word has been used increasingly since the fourth part of the 20th century to name the ethnic group of the Britons as a whole (The Brits) and in the same time period it has not been used much for naming a given individual in that group (ngram), although its usage has steadily increased even if along a comparatively much attenuated slope.

I must say that, personally, as a foreign reader of English (American and British), this is a word of which the mere internalisation - assimilation on the sole basis of context of occurrence without objective reference to the register of use - placed it in my idiolect in a particular category: it stands out as no regular vocabulary item, that is, no plain matter of fact, neutral term, and therefore it has to appear as more or less loaded with connotations. In other words, for the non-native reader that I am, it retains something of the quality of a taboo word for the foreign reader in comparison to words such as "British" and "Briton", as if it were a word that did not belong to the category of "World English", as if it were an "Anglo-Saxon affair".

Solution 3:

Brit and Briton mean the same thing. Brit is informal, like calling someone from the U.S.A. a Yank.