The right way to spell is the way most people spell. This is a popularity contest. That may come as a shock, but it is a statement of descriptivism, the fundamental principle of lexicography (dictionary-making). Descriptivism documents and explains actual usage. It describes actual usage. Its converse is prescriptivism, in which an authority attempts to dictate or regulate (prescribe) usage.
Descriptivism is a powerful principle. It may seem as though we should trust the writers of dictionaries because they know more than we do – but that is true only to the extent that they have more data and they use their dictionaries to report that data. When a dictionary tells you how to spell a word, it does so on the basis of how the word is spelled in real usage and rarely on the basis of the opinions of the writers of the dictionary.
People don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about dictionaries, let alone talking about them. If the whole subject of the authority of a dictionary comes up in the first place, people might assume that a dictionary represents the wishes of unidentified experts who somehow, behind the scenes, decide what the spellings of words are.
That actually has happened, usually in a diluted and relatively benign form, in other languages. Chinese, German, Portuguese, and Spanish have all had spelling reforms in the latter part of the 20th century; there’s an entirely separate way of writing Chinese called simplified Chinese. But spelling reform just does not happen in English. It’s been proposed from time to time, but it never actually comes to pass. (The case of French is more complicated, as authorities in Quebec and France have attempted to exert a great deal of influence over correct spelling and usage. But nobody is attempting to exert that kind of influence over English.)
Descriptivism implies that, over time, spellings may change because usage has changed. Of course this is a feedback loop: If enough people spell a word in a certain way, that becomes the official spelling. But it is not a perfect system and nothing happens overnight. If people continually mistype the as teh and commit that spelling to print or publish it online, it would be many years before teh were added as a legitimate alternate spelling, and possibly decades before it were listed as the dominant spelling. It takes a while to amass enough data for descriptionists to describe. And for neologisms that catch on quickly (as opposed to neologisms used only by the people who coin them), it can be tricky to establish a dominant spelling. (Is the slang version of an informal epithet spelled beeyotch or biotch?)
There are some cases where descriptivism fails completely. One is proper names, especially the names of people. If your family name is Smythe, nobody has any business trying to correct it to Smith. But some proper names do leave room for interpretation, especially if they include a word ending in -our or -or. (Does the U.S. Secretary of Labor become Secretary of Labour during a visit to London?)
Descriptivism can be scary at first. It sounds very much like mob rule. That’s what it is, except that the mob amasses and exerts its will in slow motion. And descriptivism can be misinterpreted: If you casually glance at a few Canadian English documents and observe that not every word in a certain category is spelled the same, you could conclude that there is no consensus about Canadian spelling and you’re free to do what you want. The opposite is the case: Given enough data, a consensus is discernible almost all the time.
When it comes to spellings of common nouns and most proper nouns, Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours is rampantly descriptivist. This book is all about telling you what everyone else is doing so that you can do exactly the same thing.
This book would be of even less interest if all I managed to accomplish was to reiterate the advice of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Its lexicographers set the standard for Canadian English usage in most respects, including spelling. But they’re too institutional and slow.
The more you read about Katherine Barber, former editor-in-chief of Canadian dictionaries at Oxford University Press, the more impressed you are meant to become at her group’s monumental reading task. They read the entire Canadian Tire catalogue (as the Globe and Mail mentioned, 2007; even the Amazon listing for the dictionary repeats that factoid). They read “logging magazines, fish-farming magazines, dairy-farmer magazines, hockey books, figure-skating books and curling books” (Toronto Star, 2007).
The editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary named podcast word of the year for 2005, but I’ve seen no evidence at all that Oxford’s Canadian editors bother to look at online sources. Perhaps “bothers” is the wrong word, because there is such a mass of text available online that it is a bother to research. But it can be done, and I did it.
I decided to conduct my own lexicographic research in parallel to Oxford’s. It might seem like a puny effort, but I don’t think it is. Barber had a staff of three; they may have worked all day on the subject, but there were only four times as many of them as there are of me. And I looked in places they didn’t.
For this book’s original research, I canvassed all the following sources using two broad methods.
In these cases, I downloaded and/or searched through voluminous full texts.
For all these categories, I read actual printed documents. For literature and periodicals, I flipped through hundreds of pages looking for telltale spellings. I looked mostly at right-hand pages, so I know for a fact that half the possible data set was ignored. I also did not read every word of what I flipped through (setting aside for the moment that the eyes read by jumping across a line of text, hence not “every word” is read). I know I missed a lot of data, but you shouldn’t underestimate how much data I managed to amass. The flip-through method is a survey.
In nearly all sources, some of the classic peculiarities of Canadian spelling are strongly upheld. Centre, organize, and neighbour are all spelled that way by most people – and the numbers are hugely in favour of those spellings. Those classic peculiarities are consistent across the board everywhere from personal blogs to award-winning fiction. The barbarians are not at the gates: These canonical Canadian spellings are widespread and stable.
So are Canadian spelling choices like tire and curb. In fact, we tend to prefer American spellings like these for objects that are in some way technical (carburetor; aluminum with one I) and for medical procedures (anesthesia). Nonetheless, payments are delivered by cheque (originally British), not by check (still American).
Things change slightly with proper names, as with names of businesses. There are surprisingly large numbers of Centers willing to do business in Canada, as are a hefty number of Labor-related concerns. Nonetheless, the majority usage is Centre and Labour. Hence, this imaginary headline is still possible only in Canada: Parts and labour 50% off at Coquitlam Tire Centre.
Where the surprises begin to pop up are in the uncommon words and formations. Does marvellous have two Ls? Only sometimes. Three Ts in targetted? Again, only sometimes. An added e in words like unhingeing and moveable? Not usually. In other words, there really is no consensus on doubled consonants (and additional Es). This is a problem for a descriptivist like me; the only advice I can give is to pick one variation and stay loyal to it. (Perhaps betraying my biases, I prefer the British-origin double-consonant version. Does that make me anti-American?)
Once you start forming compound words, confusion becomes the norm. Fibre is a noncontroversial Canadian spelling, but what about cables made from optical fibre? Are they fibreoptic (that -reo- sequence is troublesome), fibre optic (it may need a hyphen), fiberoptic, or fiber optic? How about glass fibre: Is it fiberglass, fiberglas, fibreglass, or fibreglas? It turns out that, in the periodicals I surveyed, all spellings are used in similar numbers. (Although fibre-optic has the highest usage of any of those variants, it’s likely being used as a hyphenated adjective. Among unhyphenated spellings, fibre optic beats everything.)
You’ll be able to download my full data set online (at en-CA.org/data). Here’s a detailed summary of my findings.
I carried out computer searches of thousands of journalistic articles published in Canadian magazines and newspapers. This was not a Google search; it was a precisely targetted search of the proprietary Canadian Business and Current Affairs database, which comprises over 200 periodicals.
There were some complications in this search process. For one, the database silently corrects your spelling: Search for colour and you are also, without knowing it, searching for color. After an inquiry, I was given the command to search on explicit spellings (type an asterisk after the term in question; also applies to phrases inside quotation marks).
My research covered two eras: 1987, when computers were uncommon and Canadian English spelling was obscure and unheralded, and 2002–2007, when everybody had a computer, most computers had spellcheckers, and numerous Canadian English dictionaries had been published. We can track the evolution of spellings over a 20-year period, though admittedly we aren’t tracking them month by month.
To introduce some kind of scientific validity to the survey, or at least the appearance of such validity, I deemed my findings persuasive or dependable if one spelling occurred more often than another – but only to two significant digits. For this book, that means I acted as though the two lowest digits (the ones and tens) aren’t known or are zero and only considered the third-lowest digit and above (hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands).
As such, any pair of spellings with fewer than 200 total occurrences does not present reliable data. More specifically, either spelling has to have 100 or more occurrences (99 vs. 101 or 199 vs. 1 don’t count). All other findings are merely suggestive, although they may be of interest anyway: A real finding of 199 occurrences of a certain spelling vs. one occurrence of a variant spelling may not be scientifically sound, but it shows that the latter spelling is in the minority.
The CBCA database includes some American wire copy appearing in Canadian publications. A smattering of American and French-language periodicals are included. There may be other excerpts and quotations in articles that otherwise use nothing but Canadian spellings. I viewed that contamination as insignificant, but I can’t prove it was. For some words and phrases, I limited searches to Canadian publications only and/or English-language publications only.
I surveyed about 250 separate words and phrases. Most are what is known in linguistics as minimal pairs – words or phrases with the tiniest possible difference of interest, e.g., draftsman/draughtsman (where only the f and ugh differ).
The results are rather surprising. While not every spelling is represented in significant numbers, every classic Canadian spelling is in there somewhere. The exceptions are either spelling of valorize, with or without a U (we don’t use the U), and the allegedly Canadian spelling of yogourt (zero occurrences for the latter in the 2002–2007 corpus – see discussion below). This indicates that each of the surveyed Canadian spellings are used by professional journalists and editors. Some archetypal Canadian spellings crush the competition, including centre, which occurs, as a common or proper noun, three times as often as center. Program is ten times more common than programme.
But many U.S. spellings are used almost as often as Canadian ones, and a few British spellings creep in. Disregarding significant digits for a moment, it’s possible to find all-American usages like analog, center/Center (common or proper noun), checkbook, and fiberglass. British spellings like foetal, aeons, hypoglycaemia, and orientated are also found, typically much less often (e.g., accessorise occurs only twice in the periods I checked). A few choices are rare and occur with almost equal frequency in Canadian, American, or British variants, such as artistic licence and poetic licence – both terms are rare but, when they occur, they are spelled with a C or an S about as often in all dialects.
Spellings that beat others by more than a factor of 100 (2002–2007):
Then there’s maneuver, always a tricky case. The official Canadian spelling is manoeuvre, which beat every other spelling, but if we’re just comparing the American maneuver with the nonsensical pseud-British maneuvre, American maneuver is well over 100 times as common.
The same criteria, but from 1987:
On a smaller scale, what spellings beat out the competition by a factor of 10 or more (but not 100 or more)? There are a few words and phrases for which that is true in both time periods surveyed (2002–2007 and 1987):
I chose small-market or technical publications, and all of them used across-the-board Canadian spellings – everything from storey, theatre, dialogue, mould, and colour-coded found in Canadian Architect to characterizing axiomatizable classes found in Canadian Mathematical Bulletin. (But that publication seems to prefer fibers as a spelling.)
Editors were divided on the use of doubled consonants, preferring usages like focused in some cases (Canadian Architect again) or traveller and modelled in others (Queen’s Quarterly).
Surely the most delicious finding from this set was the word Canadianization, seen in Canadian Historical Review.
The nationalist, subtly anti-American Canadian literary elite can breathe a sigh of relief: Canadian spelling is so entrenched in Canadian literature as to be unassailable.
Across the entire spectrum of award-worthy fiction and nonfiction I surveyed (over 100 books that were nominated for or actually won a literary award), core Canadian spelling is rock solid. That holds true for big-name authors, small-time poets, big-name publishers owned by foreign conglomerates, and small-time houses that barely manage a couple of books a year. It’s true of literary translations from Canadian French (that is, Quebec French) into Canadian English. It’s true of picture books, atlases, cookbooks, biographies, and novels. It’s true across the board.
All the telltale Canadian spellings you would anticipate are readily discernible: centimetres, traveller, colour, digitized, axe, endeavour, cozier, synchronized swimming, self-centredness, flat tires, paralyzed. It’s all there.
The exceptions are genuinely exceptional, and tend to be found in U.S. editions of Canadian authors. I found only one consistent case: Alice Munro’s Runaway uses American spellings all the way through.
Now, as with any large sample (many books with millions of words), there will be a few outliers, or data points at the edges of the trend. Medical terminology seems to travel between the United States and Great Britain without a stopover for refuelling at Gander (trachea, esophagus, caesarean, leukemias). It isn’t clear what’s for dinner, lasagne or lasagna.
What about Canadian-nationalist writers, like Linda McQuaig and Maude Barlow? They use Canadian spelling across the board. McQuaig and her editors are even careful enough to preserve foreign spellings in proper names, like U.S. defense secretary.
Former prime ministers? They haven’t written that many books, but the trend may be toward Canadian spelling. For example, Brian Mulroney’s Where I Stand uses organization, mobilize, recognized, and aluminum (all of which are ambiguously also American spellings).
How about Canada’s most American authors, like Douglas Coupland (born and raised in Canada) and William Gibson (born and raised in the United States)? Gibson’s books are all originally published in the United States and consistently use U.S. spellings. (Actually, there’s one inconsistency – colourized in All Tomorrow’s Parties.)
Coupland is another story. His books, perhaps not surprisingly in retrospect, mix and match spellings in accordance with the nationality of the publisher. Canadian-published books like City of Glass, Terry, The Gum Thief, and JPod use clear Canadian spelling choices (neighbourhoods, homogenization and pasteurized global taste, kilometres, favourite, pre-modelled castles, practise [verb]). U.S.-published books, including Girlfriend in a Coma and Shampoo Planet, use across-the-board U.S. spellings. Michael Lewis’s playscript of Coupland’s Life After God appears to use Canadian spelling (colourful).
It isn’t easy to determine a blog author’s nationality, which, in any case, might not correspond to the dialect the author learned in childhood. A British or American immigrant to Canada may be Canadian by naturalization, but that person might not write with Canadian spellings.
Nonetheless, it is possible to identify a subset of blogs whose authors reside in Canada. Blog awards, and Web awards generally, have little credibility, given that they’re largely self-selected and draw unrepresentatively from a giant pool of prospects. (The number of actual nominees and finalists is tiny compared to the range of possible nominees.)
But for the purposes of this book, the Canadian Blog Awards proved genuinely useful. I looked at the complete archives from one entrant in each category of the 2007 instalment of those awards. I did not attempt to be representative; I made selections almost at random. Blogs without full-year archives were excluded. In all, 23 Canadian blogs were surveyed, comprising more than 3.1 million words without HTML markup.
I did quite a lot of inspecting to make sure that the words I examined were not overtly drawn from U.S. sources (as in block quotations from American news articles), but there is inevitably some U.S. contamination in a source like this one. Blog authors who listed any kind of method were contacted; I asked about their nationality and where they learned English, but not a single one of them responded.
And guess what: These “amateur” writers, often impugned by old media because they don’t have editors looking over their shoulders, write Canadian English just as consistently as old-media writers do. Exactly three verbs were written with -ise endings rather than -ize (realise, recognise, scrutinise). But nearly 200 verb forms used -ize, including subsidize, polarizes, unmotorized, and well-publicized.
Only nine nouns used the -isation spelling (civilisations, gelatinisation, globalisation, improvisation, legitimisation, mobilisations, organisation, realisation, visualisation) compared to 75 nouns ending in -ization (including federalization, rationalizations, tribalization).
The dead-giveaway Canadian words – centre, colour, cozy, and the like – are vastly preferred by bloggers. Nobody in my sample used British spellings like kerb, cosy, furore, programme, tyre, or diarrhoea. Bloggers pay their bills by writing cheques about six times as often as checks. But licence as a noun barely has an edge over license (13 occurrences to 8); offence as a noun has lost the battle to offense, but only just (25 to 33). And bloggers are skeptical about writing sceptical with a K (69 for K, 54 for C). The manoeuvre/fibre pair is also troublesome – barely anyone writes any version of those words (even in phrases like fibre optic), and no spelling predominates.
Centre is a tricky word for this group. When used as a proper noun, Centre doesn’t exist while Center does (274 uses). That could be a case of preserving the original spelling of a proper noun. Used as a common noun, centre outnumbers center by about a third. Verb tenses tend toward American – centered (23 instances) rather than centred (two).
Bloggers wear 2½ times as much jewelry as jewellery. These writers are oriented toward interpretive dancing, not bothering with the British -ated/-ative ending most of the time. (They don’t use either variant all that often – put together, every permutation of oriented and interpretive was used a mere 29 times.)
Bloggers seem to want to average out their extra Es. There isn’t much data here: Nobody writes cringeing or infringeing (both of which are misspellings anyway), but nobody writes any of the other -ingeing verbs, either, like bingeing. Bloggers wielded seven axes and only one ax. They seem to have left the analogue world behind – for them it’s an analog world, but only just (a mere five instances). Even taking into account the confounding fact that a leading blog-software platform is called Movable Type, nobody at all wrote moveable – but they didn’t write movable in its usual sense, either.
Doubled consonants are not preferred. Verbs ending in -eted (164, including targeted, trumpeted, multifaceted) hugely outnumber those ending -etted (only three relevant words: sulphuretted, cossetted, targetted). Focused is 20 times as common as focussed. There was no reliable data on preferences for -ll- vs. -l-.
Bloggers are not really any worse at “spelling Canadian” than, say, newspaper writers are.
Justice must not merely be done, it must be seen to be done in correct Canadian spelling. Impressively, most court judgements use strict Canadian orthography.
I looked at every federal, provincial, and territorial ruling dating from 2007 that was listed on the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) database. The corpus I analyzed comprised about 4.8 million words.
Not surprisingly for judges and lawyers, words ending in -ize were rampant – about 75 discrete words (constitutionalize, institutionalize, verbalize). (I suppose that isn’t “rampant” after all, since bloggers used almost as many such words.) There was more of an adherence to British tradition, though, than the bloggers showed, with about a dozen -ise spellings (commercialise, exorcise, recognise). Some of those, like aquacise, might actually be expressed in French quotations and are not real English words.
There’s a minor trend toward doubled consonants – totalling, counselling, empanelling, and imperilling, for example (the complete list of -ll words in this corpus), or rivetted and gazetted (all the -tt- found). But the Canadian judiciary can achieve fulfillment with two Ls or one, though the double-L spelling has a minor lead.
Banking uses cheques in all but one case. A licence is a thing three times as often as a license is. There’s a single solitary use of licence as a verb. (Canadian uses license as a verb.)
Judges can’t decide if they want word-final E or not: Axe is more popular than ax, but analog beats analogue. They have cause for skepticism as often as they do for scepticism (a mere seven occurrences each).
The strangest usage is clearly center, which, whether used as a common or proper noun or in a phrasal verb (center on), is noticeably frequent at over 100 occurrences. Many of the proper-name usages should indeed not be changed, as the Simon Wiesenthal Center is not the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, but those are unusual cases. Centre in all forms is used about 360 times. A substantial lead, but center is clearly not “incorrect” as far as judges are concerned. For that matter, neither is programme, though it’s spelled that way 40 times less often than program.
I don’t see why anybody would use a printed phone book anymore. I certainly didn’t. I relied on the proprietary, hard-to-use, technically backward Canada411 database, which produced equivocal results.
In simple terms, there aren’t that many company names in Canada that use American or British spellings, but there are a few cases – over 4,500 centers, for example, and at least seven tyre shops. (Two businesses named Nokian Tyres were excluded; that’s a trade name, which, you could argue, should not be changed. Of course, it’s possible to take that endorsement of corporate misspellings a bit too far.)
Businesses named Color outnumber those named Colour by about a third (693 to 462). Another telltale Canadian spelling, labour (“parts and labour guarantee”), is easy enough to search for, but the converse spelling labor is too hard to differentiate from longer words like “laboratory” and French “laboratoire.” Hence I have no credible results for those tokens.
This was the smallest survey of all: What do provinces and territories call a permit to drive a motor vehicle? Is it a driver’s licence or a driver’s license? (Or even a driving licence?)
According to provincial and territorial Web sites (or, as in the case of B.C. and Manitoba, the sites of provincially-mandated insurers), the answer is driver’s licence. That’s the strict Canadian spelling and it holds true everywhere except Nunavut (driver’s license) and Prince Edward Island, which uses both spellings on the same page (and also includes offense as a noun).
Here I’m talking about bilingual or regional dictionaries, not general-purpose dictionaries like the Canadian Oxford.
It’s surprisingly difficult to find a bilingual Canadian dictionary that even pretends to use Canadian English spellings. This, in fact, is a growth area in Canadian nationalism, if you view Canadian orthography as nationalistic. There’s a gap in the market for a dictionary that translates between Canadian English and something else.
Renata Isajlovic’s Québécois–English English–Québécois Dictionary & Phrasebook has a New York publisher. It uses memorize, organize, and neighbouring, which qualifies handily as Canadian English.
Jean-Claude Corbeil’s French/English Visual Dictionary (1987) covers several of the bases, if not all of them, listing polarizing filter (clearly not typical British usage) but also color analyzer; colour analyser and color filter set; colour filter set and honor tiles; honour tiles (with semicolons and alternate spellings included in each of those listings). Lasagna is lasagna as far as this dictionary is concerned.
Now let’s talk about aboriginal languages, or at least Cree. Arok Wolvengrey’s Cree Words (2007) uses straight-up Canadian – alphabetized in a definition, and colour, realize, organize, and neighbour as headwords. Earle H. Waugh’s Alberta Elders’ Cree Dictionary pulls a Corbeil and tries to have it both ways or several ways, listing utilized but honoring; realized but color or colour (those three words in one listing in the original); organize but honor or honour (again, a single listing); and of course marvellous or marvelous (single listing).
There’s more than one form of Canadian English, and the regional varieties have their own literature. L. Falk’s English Language in Nova Scotia (1999) sticks to mainstream mixed U.S./U.K. spellings with pronounceable; favourable and favourably; emphasized; and much-criticized. Oddly, M.H. Scargill’s classic Modern Canadian English Usage (1974) had no telltale spellings I could find. T.K. Pratt’s PEI Sayings used favourite and centre, which could simply be British but are, Pratt told me, meant to be strictly Canadian.
The online technical thesaurus GrandDictionnaire.com translates among English, French, Spanish, and Latin, though not in every combination. It accepts American or British spellings, but does not give equivalent results for each. Some words aren’t found at all (marvellous) or are found only in a scientific context (marvelous found only as marvelous spatuletail, a hummingbird). Neighboring gives only one result (neighboring pixel), while neighbouring returns that result plus five others. You’d better write the Canadian fetal if you want a decent set of results (20 more than British foetal). Authorized returns about six times as many hits as authorised.
Of particular interest is a textbook for English-language learners of Spanish, Intercambios: Spanish for Global Communication. One of the coauthors is Stephen Henighan, an assistant professor at the University of Guelph and a frequent critic of Canadian literature. Henighan’s article “Translated from the American” in Geist (Fall 2005) explains how Henighan and his partners changed many of the cultural references in the original U.S. Intercambios textbook to references that make sense in Canada:
It was easy to change “Hi, I’m from New Jersey” to “Hi, I’m from Saskatchewan,” but anything more serious required a thorough overhaul. The dialogues in the U.S. textbook followed a student from Wisconsin in her travels through the Hispanic world....
Canada has no neutral Midwest. Whichever region I chose as my protagonist’s home, other Canadians would feel alienated. After wracking my brains, I decided that the best compromise was to weave new dialogues around three central characters of different ethnic backgrounds, one each from Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.
The Canadianized version that Henighan and his partners wrote also dared to use the metric system and to mention Cuba. But how was it written? Did it use Canadian English? Sort of.
Words like program and recognizable (and Canadianized!) are in there. The students featured in the book use traveller’s cheques (another great Canadianism). Practise is a verb and practice is a noun (sometimes used as an adjective: self-scoring practice exercises). But yogurt is the dessert, not yogourt, and double consonants are apparently too British for these Spanish-learners (targeting, focuses).
Katherine Barber of Oxford is known for her seldom-changing repertoire of anecdotes (who knew that jam-filled donuts were called “Bismarcks”?), but only one of her oft-repeated myths actually bothers me. That is her contention that the Canadian spelling of yogurt is in fact yogourt. It’s written right there on the package – and it even works in both languages!
The problem is I cannot verify the assertion that yogourt is even a common spelling, let alone a dominant one, as the Canadian Oxford asserts (going so far as to list yogurt and yoghurt as mere variants).
Of course I checked yogurt containers. I found five brands each using the spelling yogurt (Organic Meadow, Yoso, President’s Choice, Stonyfield Farm, YoBaby) and the spelling yogourt (Liberté [by far the largest single user of that spelling], Saugeen County, Everity Dairy Cooperative, Hewitt’s). That’s a tie.
Court decisions never mentioned either spelling. Bloggers used yogurt seven times (three times in a single recipe apparently pasted from a U.S. source) and yogourt exactly once. Only one company is listed in the Canada 411 directory with the Yogourt spelling, while 22 companies use Yogurt – and that latter does not include chains, often foreign-owned, like TCBY or Yogen Früz, whose full names, on the rare occasion they are listed, may include the spelling Yogurt. (TCBY stands for the Country’s Best Yogurt.)
Journalists barely ever use the spelling yogourt – in 1987, only four times, and from 2002–2007, 518 times. (Both figures are based on strict English-only searches, avoiding contamination by French.) But the yogurt spelling was used 633 times in 1987 and 11,784 times in 2002–2007 (again, English-only).
My data disprove Barber’s thesis that yogourt is the “Canadian” spelling. At best it is a variant spelling. You can feel good about dropping the second O in yogurt, which will have the side effect of precluding bilingual readers from silently hearing the pronunciation “yohguur” as they read.
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