3 ms·
Did you know that "Aluminum" was the discoverer's own spelling, and was actually used in Britain soon after the naming? "Aluminium" was an arbitrary revision ma
by Lagged2Death 13y ago
Did you know that "Aluminum" was the discoverer's own spelling, and was actually used in Britain soon after the naming? "Aluminium" was an arbitrary revision made because influential people just liked it better.
In other words, the British spelling was just a matter of British cultural hegemony at the time, just as American spellings are matters of American cultural hegemony today.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/aluminium.htm http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/aluminium.htm
I didn't know any of this until just now.
- btbuilder 13y agoThe link you posted says: "Sir Humphry made a bit of a mess of naming this new element, at first spelling it alumium (this was in 1807) then changing it to aluminum, and finally settling on aluminium in 1812." To me it reads that British academics (Sir Humphry's peers) prefered the -ium spelling. It doesn't say they used political pressure to force him to change it. While the use of both spellings were in almost equal use in the general British and US populations for a long time, the article hypothesises that the -um spelling became dominant in the US because of Webster's -um entry.