Stationery or Stationary? That is the question.
Few things are more frustrating to an experienced stationer than to see “stationery” consistently misspelled. While I am willing to concede that it is a rather mischievous word that may have originally been spelled with an “a”, I believe that most anyone applying for a professional position should be able to spell business stationery correctly.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there is actually a petition to change the spelling of stationery (as in paper) to stationary. The central argument is that the majority of people conducting an online search for “wedding stationery” or “business stationery” actually spell stationery with an “ary.” I haven’t decided whether this is democracy at work or simply a case of the inmates running the asylum. I am sure that Mr. Webster would not be pleased.
After more research, I suspect that there is a more sinister plot afoot. The culprit or facilitator of this assault on the English language is Google. Rather than suggesting “Did you mean business stationery” when the user typed “business stationary” in the search bar, Google simply accepts the improper spelling.
Business Stationary
Certainly, it is monetarily convenient for Google to capture their Pay-Per-Click (PPC) fees regardless of how stationery is spelled. Unfortunately, for those of us responsible for mounting the PPC campaigns we must enter all forms of alternative spellings to insure that our ad will be found in a Google search. Furthermore, even fine paper companies find themselves obliged to enter “stationary” in their meta tags and company description to insure that their pages will be indexed for misspellings.
The final straw was listing a stationery store in Google maps. Wendy Joblon, the owner of Folia in Dartmouth, MA was asked to list her store in one of the Google search categories:
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, but I had hoped that Google would allow us to categorize our business with the proper spelling of stationery. Google maps are most important for small businesses and we believe this function could be significantly enhanced if search categories were spelled properly.
Richard May
Organizer and Founding Member
October 30th, 2008 at 10:50 am
I too found it surprising that Google does not spell stationery correctly, and I tried to correct it only to find that I was sent back constantly to the mispelled stationary. I finally gave up and went with the flow.
I hope the other search engines are more tuned in to the correct spelling of words.
I wonder if the mispelling means that we should also mispell the word on our web site if we want to receive hits? What do other think?
October 31st, 2008 at 6:19 am
All search engines basically work the same. Words do not have to be spelled properly. If you want to capture that segment of the search audience that can’t spell properly or simply makes a typing mistake, then you should include variations of key words. Also, you may want to consider singular and plural variations such as “invitation” and “invitations”. The importance of this sad state of affairs can’t be dismissed lightly. In fact, even Crane felt obliged to list “stationary” as an alternative spelling in their meta tags on their home page.