Spellings: the headword, and alternatives

One of the less obvious tasks in writing a dictionary is deciding how to spell the headword, the word that appears at the top of the entry.

The most common current spelling is the one given as the headword

This decision is normally based on the evidence: the most common current spelling is the one given as the headword. In most cases, the decision is quite straightforward, but occasionally it requires some thought. For example, on-line has become online in the OED, as the balance of evidence shifted in favour of the unhyphenated form.

Oxford's house style occasionally takes precedence, as with verbs which can end -ize or -ise, where the -ize spelling is always used.

The OED aims to show every form in which a word has occurred throughout its history. Prior to the invention of printing, there were no dictionaries or other guides to spelling, so scribes simply made their best guess. This was usually an attempt to represent in writing the way the words sounded, which resulted in a great deal of regional variation.

The quotation evidence from our databases and from historical dictionaries such as the Middle English Dictionary are vital in describing the history of how a word has been spelled. Words that have been part of the English language for a long time often occur in dozens of different forms.

The entry for mackerel in the OED's Third Edition contains the following list of spellings:

Since the invention of the printing press, spelling has become much less variable, partly because printers wanted uniformity and partly because of a growing interest in language study during the Renaissance. Variations still occur, especially in the case of words entering the language from foreign languages such as Sanskrit or Chinese, where the method of Anglicizing the word can vary. Examples of such words include mah-jong (from Chinese; also spelled mah-jongg, mah jongh, etc.), wigwam (from Ojibwa; formerly also spelled wigg-wham, weekwam, etc.), and khaki (from Urdu; formerly also spelled kharkie, karkee, etc.).

Since the invention of the printing press, spelling has become much less variable

Sometimes a variant spelling is only spotted by chance: the word mahurat, meaning "an auspicious moment for beginning an enterprise", and originating in Sanskrit, was published in the OED for the first time in March 2000, when OED Online was launched. A colleague from Delhi, who was being given a demonstration of a prototype version of OED Online, pointed out that it had an alternative spelling muhurat, just in time for it to be added to the entry prior to publication.