Acknowledgment vs. Acknowledgement

[Joel Kulesza]

On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 10:05 Scott Kostyshak <skostysh at lyx.org> wrote:

> 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".


In these circumstances and others for style and grammar, I’ve started
turning to the Chicago Manual of Style. It has been a tremendous resource
and “rule book” to help ensure consistency for all of the above.

In this case, section 7.1 of the 17th edition would point us to
Merrimam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary as the preferred source, which
indicates acknowledgment.

Hope this helps,
Joel

P.S., just recently I was writing a paper and LyX had red underlined and
encouraged me to change from acknowledgement to acknowledgment. :-)
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