most Indians use the idiom "every nook and corner instead of every nook and cranny.Is it acceptable in native English countries like England? i have heard sentences like I searched every nook and cornerbut I could not find it.Is the idiom acceptable ?
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Check out the history of the two forms...
I can't even begin to speculate on why mainstream Anglophones switched their preference so decisively from corner to cranny in the first half of the last century. Well, maybe I can - perhaps we all just liked the "quaintness" of these unusual (almost "dialectal" nouns). But I think this chart is also relevant...
What that second chart shows is that over 70% of all instances of the relatively uncommon word cranny now occur in the "fixed phrase" [every] nook and cranny. It's the same story with nook, which is also relatively uncommon today outside this fixed form.
Note that the actual shift in preference will be even more extreme than that implied by the charts, since many of the more recent hits for the "original, obsolete" form will be direct quotes from (or misdated reprints of) much earlier instances.
Since becoming a regular here on ELL, I've become aware that "Indian English" often retains usages from Victorian times long after they're discarded by Brits and Americans - but the reason for that is a matter of culture / history, not linguistics / grammar.
Is it "acceptable"? The IE form will certainly be easily understood, but I think almost all mainstream Anglophones would think it was at the very least "odd". And if they knew the speaker wasn't a native Anglophone, they might be tempted to (helpfully) point out the "correct" version. Despite what my first chart might suggest, nowhere near 30% of native speakers today (probably not even 3%) would ever have encountered every nook and corner.
Define acceptable. The phrase is idiomatic, so it is ultimately specific to the listener.
As a native British English speaker, I'd certainly know what you meant, but I'd hear the word corner and think you'd got the idiom wrong, because I have never heard it expressed as "every nook and corner"—only "every nook and cranny".
That said, I don't regularly converse with Indian English speakers, and they may well accept corner over cranny.
If you intend to be natural-sounding to a British English speaker, stick to the British English idiom.
(The ngram is interesting, though, suggesting that nook and corner might once have been far more common...)
Just stumbled upon this older version of the phrase in a text written by an American (1830s): https://wwnorton.com/college/history/eamerica/media/ch12/resources/documents/morse.htm#:~:text=Raised%20in%20a%20deeply%20religious,foundational%20ideas%20for%20the%20telegraph Ended up here. I know FumbleFingers provided a very detailed explanation which I read with pleasure. Simply wanted to add that it looks like the American English also used "nook and corner". Which is to be expected, of course. But expressions like this are not necessarily Victorian.
