A Word, Please: There's correct, and then there's standard

By June Casagrande

April 9, 2016 2:01 PM PT

Is it canceled or cancelled? That’s what a friend who contacted me recently through Facebook needed to know.

It was 3:45 a.m. and she was finalizing a legal brief. I’m not sure what she meant by “finalizing.” I don’t even know if she’s a lawyer. Such is the nature of friendship these days. All I know is that she was having trouble deciding how to spell the past tense of “cancel” and figured her best bet was to ask a friend.

The next day, a colleague asked me to edit a short document that contained the words “useable” and “gasses.”

Hours later, I saw a BuzzFeed video about “travellers,” which reported that Darwin was inspired by “travelling” to the Galapagos and that Monet discovered “lillies” on his journeys. Unlike my friend and colleague, BuzzFeed wasn’t looking for my 2 cents. But here it comes, anyway.

“Travellers,” “travelling,” “cancelled,” “useable” and “gasses” were poor choices, even though, technically, they’re all correct spellings. “Lillies” is just wrong. And in each of these cases, the writer could have figured that out with no help from me, if only she knew about all the good stuff in her dictionary.

Every dictionary, be it digital or one of those big dusty clunkers you remember seeing in Grandma’s house, contains a wealth of information about forming past tenses and plurals, as well as help choosing between alternate spellings.

But most people don’t realize those answers are in there because dictionaries don’t list every form of a word. That is, there’s no listing for “cancelled” or even “canceled.” And most people wouldn’t bother looking under “cancel,” where they’d expect to find just a definition and not much else.

But if only they’d check those seemingly useless root word entries, they’d find everything they want to know and more, provided they know how to spot it.

In Merriam-Webster’s listing for “cancel,” one of the first things you see after the entry word is: “canceled or cancelled.” This means that, in American English at least, both spellings are correct. That’s good to know.

But what if you want help choosing between them? Actually, that help is already in front of you. Dictionaries, whenever they give you an either/or choice, tend to put the most standard form first. That’s the one editors opt for, which helps them ensure that a periodical doesn’t have “amuck” on one page and “amok” on another.

Not every verb in the dictionary has its past tense included in its listing. Look up “walk” and you won’t see “walked” after it because “walk” is a regular verb, which uses a standard “ed” ending to form its past tense. Only irregular verbs and ones that could cause confusion get their past tense forms included in the listing.

Once you understand this, the choice between “gases” and “gasses” is immediately clear. Both are acceptable, but “gases” is more standard. As for “lillies,” that’s even easier. The dictionary offers just one possible plural form: “lilies,” with just one L.

“Useable” and “traveller” require a different approach because adjectives and nouns usually get their own dictionary entries. But when you look in an American dictionary and see an entry for “traveler” but none for “traveller,” that tells you everything you need to know.

As for “useable” and “usable,” Webster’s New World College Dictionary contains listings for both spellings. But that doesn’t mean they’re equal. The given definition of “useable” is (wait for it) “usable.”

This means that the spelling without the E is better. In some cases, dictionaries use language like “variant” or “also” to introduce an alternate spelling. But as the negative connotations suggest, these forms are poor substitutes for whatever got listed before them.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.

A Word, Please: There’s correct, and then there’s standard