Compelled and compeled - American English

Question

As for the British English it's always taught - compel, compelled, compelling

Some of the books/dictionaries say that in American English you say compel, compeled, compeling instead, you simply don't double that l.

Moreover, Merriam Webster (11th Collegiate) doesn't mention "compeled" at all. With counsel - both options are listed.

Interestingly, ngram doesn't indicate much usage of "compeled". On the other hand, "counseled" is more popular than "counselled" in AmE

How is it really in American English?

Answer 1

A rule of thumb guide for consonant doubling before suffixes is this:

If the last syllable of the root is:

1. stressed
2. ends in: consonant vowel consonant

we usually double the final consonant before the suffix. There are some letters that we don't generally double before suffixes. The most important are 'w' and 'y'. The letter 'l' is not one of these letters:

• be'ginning
• 'lagging
• in'ferring
• ex'pelling

Above we see four words whose roots have stressed final syllables. As they all have a consonant/vowel/consonant ending, the final consonant is doubled. This also occurs with the verb expel in both British and American English.

Note this does not happen with most words if the final syllable is not stressed. In other words if condition (1) is not satisfied:

• 'listening
• 'offering
• 'coloring

In the examples above there is no doubling of the final consonant.

However, traditionally, in British English, but not American, we have a rule for doubling double root final 'l'. If condition (2) above applies, whether the syllable is stressed or not, we double final 'l':

• 'travelling
• 'pummelling
• 'counselling

[It should be noted, however, that some American style spelling is now an acceptable alternative for some British words. So you can also find 'pummeling' for example in texts using British English.]

Answer 2

You won't find compeled in the American Heritage Dictionary, Webster's New World College Dictionary, or ODO's US English corpus, either.

The Corpus of Contemporary American English, which samples published texts from 1990–2012, returns zero matches for compeled versus 2651 for compelled.

For that matter, it also returns zero results for expeled (vs. 2057 for expelled), zero for repeled (425 for repelled), and zero for impeled (367, impelled). There is one result for propeled, but that is almost certainly a typographical error, as propelled is used in every other instance by the same publication (the San Francisco Chronicle), and a total of 1648 times in the corpus.

The Google NGram for these forms suggest the double-L version has always predominated in American English, so it is not even a matter of one form losing popularity over time. Either your books are wrong or you have misinterpreted them.