Image via Wikipedia (Author Ben Mills)
If you read yesterday’s post (the word verdigris), you will have noticed that I included a quote from Dictionary.com where they used the word sulfate. Thinking they had spelled* it wrong (*or spelt in British English), I googled it and lo and behold sulfate is the American Way of spelling it (I must learn to trust dictionaries!).
Oxford dictionaries online define sulphate as “a salt or ester of sulphuric acid”, also explaining that it comes from French sulfate and Latin sulphur (late 18th century).
According to yahoo! answers “IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) adopted the spelling ‘sulfate’ in 1990, and other institutions followed suit”. Interesting…
So, in a nutshell, sulphate is the ‘British English’ spelling and sulfate is the ‘American English’ and also the IUPAC standard way of spelling it according to Wikipedia.
That’s all for today
Until tomorrow…
Sandra
Fancy reading something a little different? See today’s post on My OpenLeaf Journey blog Find your hardest habit and break it…
My Writing Notebook 
I’m glad you “realized” the difference.
Bruce
Posted by Bruce Stambaugh | March 5, 2012, 9:54 pmha ha – thanks for the comment Bruce 🙂
Posted by Sandra Madeira | March 6, 2012, 6:58 am