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Traveler or traveller, which is right?

by Volker Weber

Single or double l. Is that an American vs proper English difference?

Comments

Yep, double L is the British way, single is the wrong, sorry American way:)

Traveler (U.S. English) or Traveller (British English):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveler

John Cleese in his letter to the citizens of the United States of America, aka NOTICE OF REVOCATION OF INDEPENDENCE

2. There is no such thing as "US English". We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take account of the reinstated letter 'u' and the elimination of "-ize".

John Cleese letter

Immer wieder schön.

Thank you so much for the link to John Cleese's letter ... :-)

See askoxford.com.

traveller

(US also traveler)

• noun 1 a person who is travelling or who often travels. 2 a gypsy. 3 (also New Age traveller) a person who holds New Age values and leads an itinerant and unconventional lifestyle.

And see The Economist Style Guide for tips on writing English for an international audience. They use a mix... British is not always better. :-)

Hmm - the Economist may have a measure of competence in these matters, but are certainly not the final arbiters of accuracy or style...

As but one small example - "The people may also be Scotch, Scots or Scottish; choose as you like." - I for one am not going to go north of the border and start calling people 'Scotch', anyway.

Or "Gender is a word to be applied to grammar, not people" - it is perfectly legitimate to apply 'gender' to people, as long as it is in the context of a social construct, just not as a synonym for 'sex'.

And..... enough now, there are a stack of things I could challenge in there....

I have often wondered. I have owned the domain name www.travellingmessage.com for a number of years, so I have always thought two. But then I am British.

LOL, that explains a lot. I grew up writing "traveller". Then I got into the group "Blues Traveler" and was aghast that I had spelled it wrong all my life. BUT - my mother is English. Now I understand! Kind of like 'grey' and 'gray'.

The Firefox spellchecker knows it's "Traveler", but of course I'm running en-US

Webster also has only one entry: Traveler (it redirects Traveller to Traveler also).

It sounds logical that all base words ending with "L" will not have an additional L in the "er" ending form, for example:
Trail -> Trailer
Travel -> Traveler
Kill -> Killer

However words with other letters may duplicate the last letter, like words ending with "n":
Gun -> Gunner
Run -> Runner
Hug -> Hugger

Then there are even words which end with an "e", and then it's enough just to add the "r" to form the "er" ending word (since the "e" is used as part of the "er" ending also):
See -> Seer
Cue -> Cuer

The best english is "International English", it's what most countries speak.
The US English sounds like having a hot potato in your mouth, and the British english speaking people spell simple words like "No" as "Nöy", and they also switch most "er" letter parts to "re", like center -> centre, meter -> metre.

The "John Cleese letter" is funny but according to Snopes it wasn't written by Cleese.

British english speaking people spell simple words like "No" as "Nöy" ?
So Noise and Nose are the same in Britain :-)

and they also switch most "er" letter parts to "re", like center -> centre, meter -> metre.

Well actually, we didn't switch it, we left them alone :-)

And let's not get started about completely different spellings and pronunciations, such as "aluminum" (US) and "aluminium" (Brit). :)

BTW, my great-grandmother was Brit, so I suffer from the same mixing of spellings as Jess - I typically use "u"s in many words (such as flavour, etc.) and spell gray as grey and "er" words with "re". The only thing that has forced me to switch is auto-spell checkers, but I still do it quite often out of habit.

Behaviours are hard to change, it seems. ;)

@rocky, "The only thing that has forced me to switch is auto-spell checkers"

There's a simple solution to that one Rocky, just install a proper en-gb dictionary, and Robert's your mother's brother.

"traveller (United States also traveler)
noun a person who is travelling or who often travels.
(usually Traveller) British a Gypsy.
(also New Age traveller) British a person who holds New Age values and leads an itinerant and unconventional lifestyle."

from: Concise Oxford English Dictionary (the one and only)

Ist ja ein witziges gadget, dieses google-fight, kannte ich noch nicht.
Schoen entspannt angelegt, Ihre Seite. Seit 1992 machen Sie das? Alle Achtung.
Ich kam darauf, weil ich der Sache traveler vs traveller nachging.
Vielen Dank und Gruss aus Bali.

It doesn't really matter. The context of the word can be understood through both spellings.

Anyway, who cares how the British and Americans spell the word. When in doubt, use the Canadian spellings! In Canada, its traveller. (the fact that this word is underlined because of the spellchecker is funny)

Ceci n'est pas un blog

vowe.net is a personal website published by Volker Weber a.k.a. vowe. I am an author, consultant and systems architect based in Darmstadt, Germany.

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