How many L’s go in past tense of cancel? This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Double “L” in English Past Tense Words”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Teresa Tilcote. I’m calling from Plano, Texas.
Hi, Teresa. Welcome to the show. How can we help?
Well, as you’ve known, we’ve had some pretty bad weather across the United States.
And you see on TV the canceled board on the airlines of flights that are being canceled or delayed.
And I see sometimes that canceled is spelled with one L or two Ls, and I’m not sure what the proper spelling of it is.
What were you taught?
I was taught one.
And when I do spell checks, it usually comes up one, but then I see another spell check, like on dictionary, it says it’s two L’s.
So I’m thoroughly confused.
Okay.
Oh, we can work on this.
This is a solvable puzzle.
Sorry for all the cancellations, but we can solve this part.
I’m interested in that you were seeing this on the boards in…
So you’re talking like CNN will have footage, and they’ll just show the board with all the cancellations, and you’ll see sometimes a double L, right?
Exactly.
Okay. What’s interesting is that probably was a Canadian or British board and not an American board because typically in the United States we spell the word canceled with a single L.
And it’s not the only word that we do that to.
And we have words that end in vowel L and then we add an inflection like E-D or I-N-G.
We tend not to double the L.
So canceled is in the U.S. typically C-A-N-C-E-L-E-D.
However, in the UK and Canada and the rest of the English-speaking world, they don’t do that.
They double the L.
And so it’s a pretty consistent rule for a wide variety of words that end in vowel L, usually E-L.
It’s not 100% foolproof as a rule, but pretty consistent.
Even in the United States, however, the double L spelling has always been allowed.
It just hasn’t been common.
And this all goes back to that man of letters, Noah Webster, who was the one who institutionalized this spelling, put it in his books, in his dictionaries, which were widely distributed, widely taught from and widely read for a very long time.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
So, again, it’s pretty consistent.
If you want to learn more about this, I highly recommend you’re going to freak out when I say this.
The Wikipedia page on the British versus American spellings because it’s actually pretty good.
It really kind of lays out the inconsistencies and consistencies here, the places where we double the L and they don’t, and the places where they double the L and we don’t.
So next time you have a flight that’s canceled, you have something to do.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Well, thank you so much.
That makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, sure, Teresa.
Call us again sometime, all right?
Take care.
Okay, great.
Thank you so much.
Okay, bye-bye.
Email words@waywordradio.org.
