Is Deductable A Word?
This post has absolutely nothing to do with mortgages, sales, or marketing; but it is being posted in our Top of Mind Networks Mortgage Sales and Marketing Blog anyway. It is, however, relevant to a post Mark Green did a while back on proofreading tips prior to sending out a letter.
It was recently pointed out to me that an email correspondence we sent out for a client had a misspelling in it; ‘deductable’ instead of ‘deductible’. In accordance with Mark’s 5 tips for proofreading your copy, the email was read by multiple people, read backwards, and done one sentence at a time. However, nobody noticed the misspelling. When this was brought to my attention the first thing I did was check the MS Word template used to create the email, and sure enough there were no red squiggly lines under ‘deductable’. For me, that is litmus test numero uno. I know, you should never put too much weight on Microsoft’s spell check; but the common consequence of that is using one correctly-spelled word instead of the word you intended… but if a word is flat out misspelled it is usually pretty good about alerting you of that. I then did a Google search for ‘define deductable’ and found this link from allwords.com.
So my question to the audience is this, is deductable actually a misspelled word? I am not sure if this brings up the discussion of “what makes a word correctly spelled?” or “who officially decides how a word is spelled?”, but I certainly recall the old saying of ain’t ain’t a word… but that now has its own Wikipedia entry.
December 29, 2009 by davidorsini · 3 Comments
David Orsini is Chief Operating Officer of Top of Mind Networks and oversees the fulfillment and product development divisions of the company. David specializes in building systems that help mortgage professionals maximize their relationships with their client base without having to lift a finger.
This was an easy one to miss. Deductable is actually an acceptable alternate spelling in other countries. But if you “google” the word deductable, you’ll notice that the top search results say “deductible”.
This is just one of those that’s easy to slip through the cracks.
Interestingly, my office 2007 email editor gave me the squiggly lines for the word deductable. I say we just blame it on Microsoft! That’s way more fun anyhow.
When the root of a word is a complete word like, “accept” then able is used. Accept + able = Acceptable
When the root of a word is not a complete word like, “audible” then ible is used. Aud + ible = Audible
In the case of Deduct, “duc” is the root (It’s Latin) so you ignore the “De” and therefore, the correct spelling is Deductible.
Of course, the english language is riddled with exceptions, but the above, I think, nicely clears this one up.
Wow!!! I’m impressed Victoria. I had no idea.