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man-pages.7: Document "acknowledgement" as the preferred spelling 

When I inherited man-pages in 2004, it was a hodge-podge mix of
American vs British spelling. My native spelling is the latter,
but I value consistency and felt that things needed to be
standardized on one or other, and in computing, American is the
norm so that is what I settled on.

Among the changes was the substitution of various instances
of "acknowledgement" for "acknowledgment". The latter spelling is
not one I care for, but I believed it to be the American norm.

Alex Colomar proposed a patch to change the spelling back
to "acknowledgement", and some discussion and investigation
ensued, whereby I learned the following:

* The situation is not clear cut.

* Historically, "acknowledgment" was the norm in British English,
  but was eclipsed by "acknowledgement" some decades ago.

* Even in American English, "acknowledgment" is not universal,
  and "acknowledgement" has become more common in recent decades
  (although it still remains minority usage) [2].

* The BSD license uses "acknowledgement" even though it was
  (presumably) written in California.

* The POSIX standard uses "acknowledgement".

* The Debian BTS uses "acknowledgement".

* Looking at a corpus of manual pages from various systems
  that I have assembled over the years, "acknowledgement" seems
  a little more common than "acknowledgment".

Summary: the situation is not clear cut, but let's follow BSD,
POSIX, and the personal preference of the man-pages maintainers.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=acknowledgment%2Cacknowledgement&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=29&smoothing=3#

[2] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=acknowledgment%2Cacknowledgement&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=5&smoothing=3&

Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
This commit is contained in:
Michael Kerrisk 2021-01-19 10:22:49 +01:00
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@ -643,6 +643,11 @@ there are a few other subtleties to watch for:
American English tends to use the forms "backward", "upward", "toward",
and so on
rather than the British forms "backwards", "upwards", "towards", and so on.
.IP *
Opinions are divided on "acknowledgement" vs "acknowledgment".
The latter is predominant, but not universal usage in American English.
POSIX and the BSD license use the former spelling.
In the Linux man-pages project, we use "acknowledgement".
.SS BSD version numbers
The classical scheme for writing BSD version numbers is
.IR x.yBSD ,