Timeline for When to drop the 'e' when ending in -able?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
21 events
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| Jan 31 at 23:31 | comment | added | trolley813 | As for the words ending with "c" or "g", it would be really nice to use -ible suffix instead (thus tracible and managible - the same pronunciation!), but unfortunately it isn't productive anymore (i.e. us(e)able only with some Latin-origin words). | |
| Jul 6, 2021 at 1:48 | comment | added | Rick | I just had to check when writing the word "shareable." The rules would seem to say drop the e, but that's incorrect. I tried to think of other words ending in "re," and only came up with flare, which also ends up as "flareable." Not sure if that's always true. | |
| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:38 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://english.stackexchange.com/ with https://english.stackexchange.com/
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| Jan 22, 2012 at 22:34 | vote | accept | AncientSwordRage | ||
| Jan 19, 2012 at 2:49 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | Ooops, sorry! Must have been a "senior moment" brought on by conflating the fact that you're the originator here so you don't need mailboxing, whereas @tchrist (who I mean to notify) seemed to be replying to me without mailboxing. I'm completely with you on this issue, obviously. | |
| Jan 19, 2012 at 2:35 | comment | added | Jon Purdy | @FumbleFingers: I think you’re @-replying the wrong person. I’m a descriptivist as well, and the only notion of “incorrect” spelling I mention is referring to nonstandard, minority use of nondoubled consonants around short vowels. | |
| Jan 19, 2012 at 2:30 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Jon Purdy: To a first approximation I have no interest at all in the concept of "correct" in things like spelling. What matters most is what people actually say/write. I don't reference ngrams in order to "win" - I reference it to show actual usage, historical trends, US/UK differences, etc. | |
| Jan 18, 2012 at 23:18 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | The OED gives only whistleable, and gives /ˈhwɪs(ə)ləb(ə)l/ for the pronunciation in a broad phonemic transcription. As for ‘correctness’, I’m pretty sure around here all anybody really cares about is whether they’ve won the popularity contest at the top of the ngram hit-parade, just so they can go nyah-nyah. | |
| Jan 18, 2012 at 22:50 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | ...but let's not forget that at this level it's pointless to pontificate about "correct" spelling. | |
| Jan 18, 2012 at 22:49 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Jon Purdy: I personally find liveable and livable equally acceptable, though I'd actually write the livable myself (NGram says liveable was the more common until 100 years ago). On the other hand, if I read (or needed to write) haveable/giveable I'd expect the "e" because they're at the very least "unusual" forms, so it's good to have that extra letter to make it obvious where they're coming from. | |
| Jan 18, 2012 at 22:48 | history | edited | Jon Purdy | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 18, 2012 at 22:40 | comment | added | Jon Purdy | @tchrist: In throttleable, (un)settleable, whistleable, and (un)riddleable, the E is there because of the syllabic L; I’ll edit to add. I’ve never seen haveable or giveable, but they’re cromulent as there’s really no universal rule. | |
| Jan 18, 2012 at 22:32 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | The OED attests: throttleable, settleable & unsettleable, haveable, giveable, whistleable, unriddleable, &c. What model explains those sorts, hm? | |
| Jan 18, 2012 at 20:27 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Jay: A decade ago I'd have considered scrappable to be on a par with scrappage. They were both quite uncommon words, and even today Google makes me confirm I really want scrappable (20k hits) rather than scrapable (itself only 350K hits). But scrappage is right up there with over 4M hits, on account of all the government incentives to persuade us to scrap old energy-inefficient technology. Which will obviously lead a lot of people to wonder "Is my old gas-guzzler car scrappable?" (i.e. - "Will the government give me a lot of money for 'doing the right thing'?"). | |
| Jan 18, 2012 at 20:11 | comment | added | Jay | @FumbleFingers: I meant that I couldn't find "scrappable" in any of the several dictionaries I checked, not just that one I mentioned where I found "scrapable". Quite true that the failure of a word to appear in any particular dictionary does not prove that it "isn't a real word", but it would be an indication that it is unusual or specialized. What I was trying to say was that that surprised me. It seemed like it should be a fairly common word. | |
| Jan 18, 2012 at 18:26 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Jay: The fact that any particular inflected form isn't explicitly given by any particular (or indeed every) dictionary doesn't necessarily mean it's not a "valid word". In the case of scrappable here are hundreds of written instances. And it'll be far more common in things written later than the stuff indexed in Google Books. | |
| Jan 18, 2012 at 17:36 | comment | added | Jay | dictionary.com gives "scrapable" as the correct spelling for a word meaning "able to be scraped". I couldn't find any listing for "scrappable", though one would think that this would be a perfectly good word meaning "suitable for turning into scrap", as in, "Once we remove the motor the wire should be scrappable." | |
| Jan 18, 2012 at 17:30 | comment | added | Jay | Ah, interesting point. Let me clarify for you that there is a general rule that when "g" or "c" is followed by "e", "i" or "y" it has the soft sound (g->j, c->s), but when followed by any other letter it has the hard sound (c like k, g like ... g). | |
| Jan 18, 2012 at 17:29 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | + scrapeable/scrappable is a good example. It's a shame we don't use a verb "to cape" (form into a cape, perhaps). There was discussion over whether the Deepwater Horizon leak could be capped ("cappable"), so given we've already got the totally unrelated word capable, that would really set the cat among the pigeons! | |
| Jan 18, 2012 at 17:07 | history | edited | Jon Purdy | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 18, 2012 at 17:02 | history | answered | Jon Purdy | CC BY-SA 3.0 |