Lexical differences between British and American variants of English

This paper studies the differences between American and British English, in particular lexical peculiarities of each variant. The author tracks down the genesis of American English and explores the academic disputes on whether the American English is an independent language. The article also gives a brief description of different types of Americanisms - groups of words belonging solely to American English. The author managed to explore certain examples of set expressions and to determine the peculiarity of their usage in both variants of English.