Ah, the age-old debate that sparkles with a touch of linguistic charm: should it be ‘jewelry’ or ‘jewellery’ here in Canada?
Our friends down south spell it ‘jewelry’, keeping it short and snappy.
However, across the pond, the Brits prefer ‘jewellery’, lending an extra letter to the elegance.
Here in Canada, we find ourselves nestled comfortably in the middle, embracing both spellings with open arms, much like we do with our cultural influences. But which is actually correct?
Changes Over Time
To find out which is more common in actual usage, we used Google trends, comparing ‘jewelry’ and ‘jewellery’ all the way back to the earliest point that Google offer data: 2004.
Looking below, you can see that the two terms were searched online a similar amount until 2008. However, after 2008 there is a clear change – ‘jewelry’ (the blue line) becomes significantly more popular:
What Do Our Largest Publications Use?
Most media publications have a set of style rules that they abide by.
This tells their writers how to capitalise headlines, where to place semi-colons, whether full-stops are required on bullet points, etc. But not, apparently, whether to use ‘jewelry’ or ‘jewellery’ in their articles!
Searching the Toronto Star, we can see that ‘jewellery’ is used 2,134 in articles:
So, it looks like this is their chosen spelling, right?
Unfortunately not. If we search ‘jewelry’, it appears 3,684 times!
Looking on the left coast, ‘jewellery’ appears 6,215 on The Globe and Mail website:
It looks like they’ve made their choice and they’re sticking with it, right?
Again, this isn’t the case – ‘jewelry’ appears 848 times on their website.
So both ‘jewellery’ and ‘jewelry’ are used by our newspapers, although it should be noted that some of the use of ‘jewelry’ may be on press releases from the US that haven’t been localised.
What Does Our Government Use?
OK, so the public are split on this. It seems like publications are split on this, but surely our official Government website must have the answer for us?
On Canada.ca, jewellery appears 3,060 times at the time of writing:
By contrast, ‘Jewelry’ appears just 761 times:
This obviously hints that, as far as official channels are concerned, ‘jewellery’ is more correct, but not definitive.
The tie-breaker
Finally, we’ll look at Canada’s largest association of jewellers – the Canadian Jewellers Association.
On their website and throughout their publications, they are steadfast with their usage of ‘jewellery’:
For us, that’s the decider – the source of truth that we’ll abide by:
In Canada, the correct spelling is jewellery rather than jewelry
Of course, that’s not to say we aren’t hedging our bets. If you navigate to jewelrycanada.ca, you’ll find yourself redirected back to jewellerycanada.ca, just in case.
