Variant Spellings
Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2014 2:55 am
Not too long ago, in a creative writing class at school, I was writing a story and was describing the "grey clouds in the sky brewing" and received a red editing mark from a classmate.
"You spelled 'gray' wrong," he said with confidence. He was certain he had found an error.
"What? No, you can spell it either way." Suddenly, I was hit with the realization of variant spellings- those small little things, silently dividing the population in a way one might have never realized before.
There are a lot of variant spelling words out there. A lot of these are caused by American English versus... well, I will have to call it "English English". Some variant spelling words include:
-gray/grey
-disc/disk
-canceled/cancelled
-traveled/travelled
-fetus/foetus
-color/colour
-armor/armour
-archeology/archaeology
Sometimes, these differences go beyond mere spelling. One issue I ran into in my even earlier years consisted of writing my 4's with the triangle instead of like an upside-down lowercase h. Even to this day, I find that I am one of the only ones that write my 4's with the triangle.
As I end my babble about word terminology, I ask a question to you- have you had any strange run-ins with variant spellings, or maybe pronunciations? Which spellings do you prefer?
"You spelled 'gray' wrong," he said with confidence. He was certain he had found an error.
"What? No, you can spell it either way." Suddenly, I was hit with the realization of variant spellings- those small little things, silently dividing the population in a way one might have never realized before.
There are a lot of variant spelling words out there. A lot of these are caused by American English versus... well, I will have to call it "English English". Some variant spelling words include:
-gray/grey
-disc/disk
-canceled/cancelled
-traveled/travelled
-fetus/foetus
-color/colour
-armor/armour
-archeology/archaeology
Sometimes, these differences go beyond mere spelling. One issue I ran into in my even earlier years consisted of writing my 4's with the triangle instead of like an upside-down lowercase h. Even to this day, I find that I am one of the only ones that write my 4's with the triangle.
As I end my babble about word terminology, I ask a question to you- have you had any strange run-ins with variant spellings, or maybe pronunciations? Which spellings do you prefer?