“Theater” vs. “Theatre”: The Great New York Times Language Swap

Might be interesting to graph all these next to editor or leadership changes, as well as style guide revisions. Or actually, current events, now that I look at some of the years where it's been sharpest.

thret• 12 years ago

http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=disk.disc

gpmcadam3• 12 years ago

I'm not sure this is a valid comparison as 'disk' and 'disc' aren't synonymous, as evidenced by the lack of a clear pattern of change in the graph.

flomo• 12 years ago

What this shows is the old NY Times house style oddity where they described CDs as "compact disks" rather than using the trademark Compact Disc. (Pre-1980, it is not clear to me.)

snogglethorpe• 12 years ago

"Tokyo" replaced "Tokio" in about 1930: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=tokyo.tokio ["Tokyo" is somewhat closer to the Japanese pronunciation]

"Muslim" replaced "moslem" in about 1988: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=moslem.muslim [Apparently for good reason: http://hnn.us/article/524 ]

"Peking" was replaced by "Peiping" in 1930, but it was back to "Peking" in 1962, and then finally changed to "Beijing" in 1985: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=peking.beijing.peiping

NAFV_P• 12 years ago

Tokyo used to be called 'Edo'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo

oska• 12 years ago

The history of, and explanations for, the varieties of names for Beijing ('northern capital') is so complex and detailed that it gets its own wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Beijing

See also [1]: Bosat Man, Backhill/Peking/Beijing (1990), which is not currently included as a reference in the above wikipedia article.

[1] http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp019_peking_beijing....

DanBC4• 12 years ago

Constantinople vs Istanbul shows a nice clean switch: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=constantinople.istanbu...

Burma vs Myanmar is messier http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=burma.myanmar

spingsprong• 12 years ago

Rumania vs Romania http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=rumania.romania

taejo• 12 years ago

Possibly even Roumania vs Rumania vs Romania: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=rumania.romania.rouman...

SixSigma2• 12 years ago

http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=istanbul.constantinopl...

This was by edict

"The international name Constantinople also remained in use until the Turkish Postal Service Law of March 28, 1930, according to which all foreign countries were asked to solely use the name Istanbul also in their languages and their postal service networks."

DanBC4• 12 years ago

Compare that to Myanmar / Burma, who also ask people to use the Myanmar form. Since it's not a democratic government there is some resistance to the new name.

http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=burma.myanmar

paul_f• 12 years ago

Surely I'm not the only one who instantly thought of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsRuurcTTSk

rdwallis• 12 years ago

More interesting for programmers:

http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=program.programme

And programme seems to be having a very slight resurgence since 2012.

jeffbr132• 12 years ago

It's "programme" in British-English for everything except "computer program" (in my experience). Probably because most programmer-culture is centred in North America.

I imagine that it's simply some NYT writer(s) using the British-English spelling, rather than a wider cultural trend, unless somebody is aware of any other examples?

jsmeaton• 12 years ago

This is one I've been wondering about for awhile:

http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=cooperation.co-operati...

I thought the change happened somewhere around the 80-90's. Guess it depends on the country also.

yxhuvud• 12 years ago

It is too bad it doesn't differentiate between cooperation and coöperation.

_delirium5• 12 years ago

The Google Books dataset suggests the crossover point was around 1905 in AmE, but not until the late 1970s in BrE (modulo the usual caveats about how their data isn't necessarily a representative sample):

AmE: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cooperation%2C...

BrE: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cooperation%2C...

IvyMike• 12 years ago

I think there's a general trend towards dropping the hyphen in common words.

Knuth talks about this in his discussion over "e-mail" v "email": http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html

pacaro2• 12 years ago

The first of these is still spelled æsthetic in some places. The general convention in US spelling of replacing æ and œ with e seems more jarring to me than other differences in orthography between US and commonwealth English

I can't run the nytlabs thing because a) windows phone, and b) when I try to enter æ I get another character... (potentially see (a))

_delirium5• 12 years ago

It's typically spelled aesthetic in American English nowadays (without the ligature). In that one the NYT was a hold-out in the other direction: esthetic never overtook aesthetic in general American usage, though for a period in the 20th century it looked like it might (encyclopedia did definitively displace encyclopaedia). It looks like the NYT wholesale made the ae->e switch around 1920, and then in the case of aesthetic finally realized it wasn't going to happen, and reverted to common usage in 2000.

sspiff• 12 years ago

Nice list. Seems like they did a "major" reform around the turn of the century, many examples I've seen seem to be replacement around 1999/2000.

jacobolus• 12 years ago

This was discovered a week ago on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090272

wyager• 12 years ago

These swaps are clearly "non-organic" (i.e. didn't emerge from gradual changes in colloquial language). Are they the result of a change in editing staff? Spelling correction software?

ghshephard2• 12 years ago

They updated their style guide.

gpmcadam3• 12 years ago

Are the style guides updated to reflect the public use of these words? If so, I imagine if we were to graph the change in use over time in the public would be a much more gradual and organic one?

briandear• 12 years ago

In 1961 there was no spelling correction software.

sanoli• 12 years ago

"In 1961, Les Earnest, who headed the research on this budding technology, saw it necessary to include the first spell checker that accessed a list of 10,000 acceptable words."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spell_checker

ghshephard2• 12 years ago

I could have really used Chronicle in high school english (1987) - I was constantly getting essays handed back with the accusation that I was making up words (said evidence being the lack of the words in my English instructor's somewhat dated dictionary).

"Horrific" was one that always got me in trouble - though, apparently, it is a somewhat new word.

http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=horrific

SixSigma2• 12 years ago

While searching for my own I tried "computer"

http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=computer&format=count

Virtually none before 1950 except a strange peak in 1938 of 66. My curiosity piqued I dug deeper to find out it was the name of a horse !

marjwyatt• 12 years ago

I was just puzzling about this the other day. I live in the USA and I've always spelled the word as theatre. Only recently, I've noticed that spellcheck is balking at this.

It's somewhat comforting to know that my way of spelling the word isn't wrong and I don't really mind that my country wants to spell it differently.

rmason• 12 years ago

I've always used theatre myself. I always believed that it depended largely on when you first encountered the word in school. If you came of age in the fifties or sixties that was the common spelling of the word. I can even remember movie theatres, pre multiplexes spelling it that way. If you're younger and spell it as theatre then you're an Anglophile;<).

icantthinkofone2• 12 years ago

If a movie theater spelled it as 're' then that was wrong. I think you are mis-remembering.

toyg• 12 years ago

It's somewhat comforting to know that my way of spelling the word isn't wrong

It might even be more comforting to know that your way is actually more correct, in a traditionalist sense: the Anglo-French theatre comes directly from Greek théatron (through Latin thĕātrum). Somehow "your country" is bent on morphing the word for whatever reason, similarly to what they are doing to center/centre.

driverdan• 12 years ago

How is theatre more right than theater when comparing it to théatron?

tzs• 12 years ago

It's not really accurate to say the US is the one doing the morphing. Before the early 19th century, both spellings of most of these words were acceptable in the UK and the US, because these words came into English both from French and from Latin. It's more accurate to say that the UK and the US, when each settled on one of the two spellings as standard, chose to settle differently.

This standardization in the US was greatly influenced by Noah Webster and his dictionary. He tended to go with the spelling variant that fit more with how the word was pronounced. His dictionary was influential enough to make those spellings dominant in the US. Those spellings then came to be seen as Americanisms in the UK (even though they had long been acceptable UK spellings...), and so the UK standardized on the other spellings.

Webster was also an advocate of spelling simplification, and was responsible for dropping the 'k' from 'musick' and 'publick', and those were picked up in the UK.

See: http://www.livescience.com/33844-british-american-word-spell...

ubernostrum2• 12 years ago

Or somehow Britain and its overseas colonies didn't have any standardized spelling for words for a long time, and so spellings fell in and out of favor and whatever was in vogue in each place at the time the earliest widely-accepted dictionaries were compiled became the "right" spelling for that location.

(speaking of which, Commonwealth English has a stronger tendency to hypercorrect and create false spellings which actually differ from the imagined root; "foetus" is the classic example, since the Latin root was actually just "fetus")

dewiz• 12 years ago

on a different angle, "smartphone" first occurrence in 1998, which matches with wikipedia reporting it in 1997 from Ericsson blob:http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/d4661696-f25d-47be-8a83-8996420...

DanBC4• 12 years ago

They use "internet" a more than either "www" or "world wide web". http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=internet.www.%22world%...

Comparing some of the social networks is interesting: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=twitter.facebook.myspa...

They didn't change connexion to connection: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=connexion.connection

No pedophile or paedophile before 1986? http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=paedophile.pedophile

I'm vaguely interested about why aluminium has peaks between 1955 and 1970 (although it's always much lower than aluminum) http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=aluminum.aluminium

A couple of words show small peaks from 2010:

metre http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=meter.metre

labour http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=labour.labor

gpmcadam3• 12 years ago

Something I've noticed (anecdotally) over the past few years in the USA is the switch from the term 'cell phone' to 'mobile phone'. Here in the UK we've used the term 'mobile phone' exclusively I think for the past 20 or 30 years.

It's not as clear as other examples, but you can certainly see a visible trend in the last decade: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=Mobile%20phone.Cell%20...

CamperBob22• 12 years ago

Kind of amusing to see the archaic term "wireless" start to recover its popularity around 1990.

itry4• 12 years ago

Funny, how years get born and then forgotten over time:

http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=2010.2000.1990.1980.19...

There is a little anticipation in the preceding years, then a big explosion in the year itself and then slow decline in the following years.

acjohnson55• 12 years ago

The secondary peaks 2-4 years out are interesting. Or perhaps it's better conceptualized as troughs the year after. Wonder what the reason is for that?

itry4• 12 years ago

I was thinking about these too. I did not came up with an idea what it could be. Maybe just noise and we interpret something into it?

zeckalpha• 12 years ago

Elections?

jimhefferon• 12 years ago

The availability of the substitute "last year" for "2013"?

icantthinkofone2• 12 years ago

As an aside, my web dev company runs about 10 web sites for theatre companies and all of them spell their names ending in 're' while the venues they play at spell their names ending in 'er'.

The first time we signed up one of these companies, I asked about the spelling and was given the same history as outlined in the article. With the second company that signed us, we mis-typed theatre and were taken to the woodshed for making the error.

So we are used to spelling it as theatre in the correct use of the word and are surprised the NY Times has not for many years.

danieltillett2• 12 years ago

This is exactly what I have been trying to achieve with my CutSpel Chrome extension - so far not too much interest, but I might try another submission in a little while.

http://www.cutspel.com

tnorthcutt• 12 years ago

I'd argue there's a vast difference between using two different, accepted spellings of a word, and using a Chrome extension that alters English words, transforming them into not English words.

danieltillett2• 12 years ago

I think you might have misunderstood what cutspel is trying to achieve. This is the same thing as what NYT did by choosing a different spelling - that is to reform English spelling through familiarity with a new spelling. It worked for theater so why not other words.

The text on the page after modification by cutspel is still English - just more rationaly spelt.

codingdave• 12 years ago

While the discussion of language is mildly interesting, I suspect these changes are editorial decisions, likely caused by staff changes at the paper.

dekhn• 12 years ago

NY Times used 'cigaret' for 'cigarette' for about a year or so. They switched back in embarassment.

JacobEdelman2• 12 years ago

"He" is and has always been more common than "She". http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=she.he

JacobEdelman2• 12 years ago

The word "It" has never appeared in the NY Times. http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=it

maxmcd3• 12 years ago

http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=it.this.that.an.a.thes...

ubernostrum2• 12 years ago

Either that or, as the other reply points out, the search function uses the same kind of list of stop words as any other general search.

thelastpizza• 12 years ago

Istanbul, of course, used to be Constantinople, but a long time gone is about 1930: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=istanbul.constantinopl...

bane• 12 years ago

Corea and Korea

http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=korea.corea.korean.cor...

Some history: "Corea" was more common in the English speaking world for the territory we call Korea today. At some point during the Japanese colonial period, as Japan solidified its ownership of the territory, the preferred spelling in English speaking countries became "Korea". ("Corea" is still used in many other languages and neither the Koreans nor the Japanese use Korea or Corea when talking about the peninsula).

There's a conspiracy theory that one of the cultural suppression activities the Japanese colonial government took part in (along with forcible language conversion and various geomanctic engineering efforts like driving thousands of iron poles into the ground at traditional seats of Korean power and moving entrance gates to palaces to break the flow of Chi) was broadcasting out to the world that "Korea" was the preferred spelling since it put Korea after Japan in alphabetized lists of countries in English speaking territories.

More pragmatically, both spellings were used up until the 20th century. But Korea was relatively unknown in the West outside of mild curiosity. The actual popularization of one spelling over the other seems to be the result of writings on Korea by the U.S. missionary and later consul general at the time, Horace Newton Allen, who exclusively used "Korea" when writing about the country.

This spelling was picked up and at the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, the exhibit listed both spellings as correct, but people were generally told that "Korea" was the preferred spelling. Allen was heavily involved in the planning of the exhibit.

On the graph here, you can see that Korea wasn't a topic at all in the NYTs reporting until directly after the exhibition, which seems to have been successful in bringing attention to the country. But the more familiar "Corea" was used until 1897, when it was pretty much dropped in favor or "Korea".

Interest stayed low until the Korean war after which the amount of reporting on the country steadily increased.

jarnix• 12 years ago

booooring

chestnut-tree• 12 years ago

Another difference in usage between British English and American English: In the US, you go to a movie theater to see a film. Or you go to the theater to see a play.

In the UK, you go to a cinema to see a film. Going to the theatre is understood to mean going to see a play/musical/performing arts.

jahewson• 12 years ago

In the US you go to a movie theatre to see a movie.

wldcordeiro• 12 years ago

I've always heard the distinction being that "theater" is general and applies more to movie theaters whereas "theatre" was more specifically stage plays.

itry4• 12 years ago

"Yesterday" has suffered greatly lately:

http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=yesterday

maxmcd3• 12 years ago

Looks like saying the specific day is now preffered: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=yesterday.monday.tuesd...

I searched some other rough synonyms of yesterday, but this had the strongest match.

EEGuy• 12 years ago

Dropped to 0.02% circa 1878, stayed about there until a slow trend upwards started in 2012, now at 0.09% in 2014: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=while.whilst&format=pe...

Istof• 12 years ago

théatre...

breakfastKid• 12 years ago

In high school chemistry (mid 1990's), I was told that "sulfur" had become standardised over "sulphur". Seems like this began happening in the mid 70's... http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=sulfur.sulphur

“Theater” vs. “Theatre”: The Great New York Times Language Swap

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