Acknowledgment vs. Acknowledgement

Scott Kostyshak skostysh at lyx.org
Mon Jan 30 17:05:33 UTC 2023


On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 07:26:31AM +0100, Jürgen Spitzmüller wrote:
> Am Montag, dem 30.01.2023 um 08:28 +1300 schrieb Andrew Parsloe:
> > Just to confuse matters, my "New Oxford English Dictionary" (in fact 
> > from the 1990s) has "acknowledgement (also acknowledgment)" whereas
> > with words like "colour" and "tyre" it has "colour (US color)", "tyre
> > (US tire)". In other words, it doesn't see the 
> > "acknowledgement/acknowledgment" distinction as a UK/US one.
> 
> Thanks. According to my (rather superficial) research, both variants
> seem to be used in both regions to _some_ degree, though the "e"
> variant seems to be significantly more frequent outside US than within
> US and Canada, where the other variant seems more common.
> 
> Some dictionaries, and particular spelling-related blogs and fora do
> make the distinction explicitly. I have become aware of it while
> revising the English Additional Features manual, as my (US) English
> spellchecker (hunspell) nagged about Acknowledgement and suggested
> Acknowledgment.
> 
> Such national variety distinctions are always fuzzy when you look
> closer. The question here probably boils down to what users from that
> regions would expect.

I wish I could give a helpful perspective from a "native" U.S. English
speaker, but this word (and its friends "judgment" and "judgement") have
haunted me for a long time. Just going off of memory, I think I usually
spell it "acknowledgement" because that makes more sense to me from a
spelling "rules" perspective, but I remember searching and realizing
that "acknowledgment" is indeed the U.S. way to spell it. So now I try
to use that for consistency. But every few months or so, whenever I
spell it the U.S. way I second-guess myself and think I've made a
spelling mistake and I spend 10 minutes googling and looking at
discussions and historical origins and then I spend another 2 minutes
lamenting that the time I spent googling was not worth the cost of a
potential spelling mistake.

In summary, I think you are right that in U.S. English the most common
is "acknowledgment".

Scott
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