Asking this here because I suspect it’s largely an American idiom. Do you use one or both of these terms, or something different? I have heard both all my life, here in the rural Northeast, and they seem to be interchangeable. It’s not at all uncommon, in this area of northern NY, to hear “Did you hear Ed had a fire last night? Yeah, his whole house burned up.” I’m talking about from an anthropological POV, not what you might find in a text or guide to English usage. So, how people actually *talk,* not how someone *says* they should talk.
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Burn up refers to fire building up
Burn down refers to the structure falling apart and collapsing due to incineration
Have you ever witnessed a house fire? Both are true. It burns up when the smoke reaches its flash point. Flames reach significantly higher than the structure due to the carbon in the smoke igniting. Then, the structure falls down.
In the U.S., buildings are said to burn down, and most everything else burns up. I think the resulting rubble of a building burning is the source of burning “down”. Burning up tends to convey that nothing remains. “Burn up” is not all that common to say really unless you’re a kid as it is pretty redundant.
Why can you ‘raize’ a building and ‘raise’ a building and they mean very different things.
I don’t know, I’m just burned out
Every language is different with its use of prepositions. English is no worse than Spanish (or any other language).
For example, in Spanish to say “I have to eat” you’d say “Tengo que comer”, even though the word “que” is not used as the word “to” in any other context and a literal translation would make no sense to English speakers. Or if you want to say “I just ate” you’d say “Acabo de comer”. Again, the ‘de’ is meaningless to us English speakers if a literal translation is used. Why is Spanish this way? It just is. Linguistics isn’t as precise and logical as mathematics.
As for the “burn up” vs “burn down” debate, “burn down” is more commonly used. “Burn up” in regards to a house is , for lack of a better phrase given the debate, less formal. There are no hard rules and you’d be understood either way.
“Burned up” means something has been consumed by fire. The ‘up’ here doesn’t really mean a direction. It’s like “eaten up”, it just means entirely.
“Burned down” means a structure has been destroyed by fire.
Also northeast. I pretty much would use burn down with a building or forest or something that’s collapsed or burned to the ground.
But anything destroyed by fire and left as nothing ashes and smoke can be said to burn up. Including buildings and forests.
“burn up” has the same root thinking as “use up”, “eat up”, “light up” and a number of others. The up just indicates that whatever it was happened to the entire object/person/place.
Burn down is specific to buildings and a much more common phrase when discussing them. It’s the pretty basic visual of a tall standing building now being a low pile of rubble, no different than saying knocked down.
A building or other (snicker snicker) erection burns down.
Anything else *is* burned up.
I’ve never heard that idiom haha
It’s because they are both inflammable and flammable.
Burned down is for a structure, or something similar. A house or a barn burns down. I think there’s an implied part of the phrase “burn down [to the ground]” there.
Burn up can mean both literal and metaphorical fire, a piece of wood can be burning up, or a person with a fever could be burning up
We tend to use “burning up” more in the present tense, and “burned down” in the past tense.
Though it wouldn’t be too out of place to hear either one used in place of the other.
Language is arbitrary my man, it’s not always perfectly logical. Why do we drive on the parkway and park in the driveway, you know?
English is a weird language. If you take something out of the freezer, you can thaw it or you can de-thaw it. We drive in parkways and park in driveways. Vegetarians eat vegetation, but humanitarians don’t eat people.
Fire goes up, then the building falls down.
“Burned down” means it caught on fire and collapsed.
“Burned up” means it was completely destroyed in a fire.
Example: My friend’s house burned down. All her childhood photos have been burned up.
it’s because they’re both flammable and inflammable
I’ve never once seen “burned up” used in that context. That’s clunky and not how people talk here.
Flames travel upward. At some point if the fire isn’t put out the building burns down to ashes.
You can both turn up and down the AC to make it colder too.
Inflammable means flammable?
The flames burn up, the house burns down.