Reader’s question: In Australian English, do we say judgment or judgement and lodgment or lodgement?
Answer: I think in Australian and New Zealand English, we tend to use judgement and lodgement in everyday usage, but judgment is often used in legal writing. American spelling tends to prefer judgment.
Pam Peters, The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide, says the following about judgement versus judgment. (Same applies to lodgment and lodgement.)
‘In British English, both spellings have their place. Judgement is given priority in the Oxford Dictionary (1989), which argues against the “unscholarly habit of omitting the -e”, while allowing that judgment tends to appear in legal contexts. New Oxford (1998) also endorses judgement, and its wide popularity is confirmed in BNC [British National Corpus] data, where it appears in twice as many source texts as judgment. It is of course the more regular spelling, maintaining the -e of the verb’s stem before the suffix -ment (cf advertisement … ) Yet judgment has been in general use since C16, and was the spelling enshrined in the Authorized Version of the bible 1611). This early use helps to explain why it’s the standard spelling in American English. Judgment takes priority in Webster’s Third (1986) and dominates in data from CCAE [Cambridge International Corpus of American English], outnumbering judgement by more than 30:1. In Canada, judgment is also the commoner spelling of the two, according to Canadian English Usage (1997), though both are in use. Australians however are more inclined towards judgement.’
The British National Corpus (BNC)
Drawn from a wide cross-section of sources, the BNC (http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/) is a 100 million word collection of samples of current British English, both spoken and written.
I searched for both judgement and judgment and found judgement had 2442 entries, and judgment 3221. Is the tide turning towards judgment? I note that The Sydney Morning Herald uses judgment.
Online grammar programs
If you want to learn more about grammar, register for one of Mary’s online grammar courses at www.onlinewritingtraining.com.au
