[marjwyatt]

I was just puzzling about this the other day. I live in the USA and I've always spelled the word as theatre. Only recently, I've noticed that spellcheck is balking at this.

It's somewhat comforting to know that my way of spelling the word isn't wrong and I don't really mind that my country wants to spell it differently.

[toyg]

> It's somewhat comforting to know that my way of spelling the word isn't wrong

It might even be more comforting to know that your way is actually more correct, in a traditionalist sense: the Anglo-French theatre comes directly from Greek théatron (through Latin thĕātrum). Somehow "your country" is bent on morphing the word for whatever reason, similarly to what they are doing to center/centre.

[tzs]

It's not really accurate to say the US is the one doing the morphing. Before the early 19th century, both spellings of most of these words were acceptable in the UK and the US, because these words came into English both from French and from Latin. It's more accurate to say that the UK and the US, when each settled on one of the two spellings as standard, chose to settle differently.

This standardization in the US was greatly influenced by Noah Webster and his dictionary. He tended to go with the spelling variant that fit more with how the word was pronounced. His dictionary was influential enough to make those spellings dominant in the US. Those spellings then came to be seen as Americanisms in the UK (even though they had long been acceptable UK spellings...), and so the UK standardized on the other spellings.

Webster was also an advocate of spelling simplification, and was responsible for dropping the 'k' from 'musick' and 'publick', and those were picked up in the UK.

See: http://www.livescience.com/33844-british-american-word-spell...

[ubernostrum]

Or somehow Britain and its overseas colonies didn't have any standardized spelling for words for a long time, and so spellings fell in and out of favor and whatever was in vogue in each place at the time the earliest widely-accepted dictionaries were compiled became the "right" spelling for that location.

(speaking of which, Commonwealth English has a stronger tendency to hypercorrect and create false spellings which actually differ from the imagined root; "foetus" is the classic example, since the Latin root was actually just "fetus")

[driverdan]

How is theatre more right than theater when comparing it to théatron?

[rmason]

I've always used theatre myself. I always believed that it depended largely on when you first encountered the word in school. If you came of age in the fifties or sixties that was the common spelling of the word. I can even remember movie theatres, pre multiplexes spelling it that way. If you're younger and spell it as theatre then you're an Anglophile;<).

[icantthinkofone]

If a movie theater spelled it as 're' then that was wrong. I think you are mis-remembering.