‘Call in Sick’ or ‘Call out Sick’?

MAP KEY: red=call in sick. yellow=call out sick. green=call off sick. blue=mixed.

Caller Question: "Hi, Grammar Girl. This is Ellen from Newark, California. I have a question. I am 60 years old, and I always use the phrase or heard the phrase 'calling in sick' if I couldn't make it to work. Or if someone couldn't make it to work, they would call in to say they were sick and couldn't come to work. But in recent years, like within the last 10 years, I have heard family members say they're 'calling out' and that sounded very strange to me. But even today in the 'Washington Post,' there was an article and sure enough it used the phrase 'calling out sick' because of COVID. Employees are calling out. So I just was curious about the phrases 'calling in sick' and 'calling out sick.' Thanks a lot."

Thanks for the question, Ellen.

I've always said "call in sick." The way I think of it is that you call in to the office to say you'll be out sick. And if I call in and you take the call, you would tell everyone else that Mignon is going to be off sick or out sick today.

'Call in Sick' is the most common phrase

Looking at how often these phrases appear in books Google has scanned, I found that "call in sick" is dramatically more common than "call out sick" in both American and British English. In fact, "call out sick" doesn't seem to appear in books categorized as British English at all. And it's the same when you look at variations like "called" and "calling." 

I found the same thing when I looked at the Corpus of Contemporary American English: "call in sick" shows up about 100 times more often than "call out sick" (307 versus 3). That database does have more casual sources than the Google Books database, like transcripts from movies and TV shows, but I wondered if maybe in even more casual use, like on Twitter, I'd find "call out sick" more often. And I did, but it was still 10-to-1 in favor of "call in sick" (61 versus 6 in a 4-hour period in the middle of the day,...

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