💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2023 › 202301 › 20230104-a-question-on-spelling.gmi captured on 2024-05-26 at 15:02:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
---
The English language, being a amalgamation of several predecessors, has many strange spelling rules. Some of these rules, however, vary from one dialect of English to another. A well-known example of this is the spelling of words that end with an "e" and an "r": in America English, the common spellings are "meter", "liter" and "center", while other forms of English use the spellings "metre", "litre" and "centre".
I noticed the other day that the words subject to this particular change all seem to end in end in "ter"/"tre". Meanwhile, words like "acre" and "mediocre"--words that end in "cre"--have the same spelling in all variants of English that I know of.
Does anyone know if this is a common occurrence in English, or if some obscure spelling rule applies? I'm curious to learn more about it.
---
[Last updated: 2023-01-04]