Contact Lense: Misspelling or Common Sense?

Linguist or not, browse Lenstore.co.uk to find your contact lense.

Britain’s School Minister, or, should I say minister for educashun, can’t spell, the Sun newspaper wrote earlier this year, quoting misspellings like ‘acheiving’ and ‘maintainence’ from the Cambridge graduate’s website. Now it seems that the British public is not much better, as nearly 7000 Britons search for the phrase ‘contact lense’ in Google during just one month. While ‘contact lenses’ is by far the most popular search phrase, the difference in search volume between the phrases ‘contact lens’ and ‘contact lense’ is smaller than seems sensible.

But what is sensible is debatable, blogger Tony Papard claims. The British spelling of ‘traveller’ is counter-intuitive, while the American ‘traveler’ makes much more sense, as the British double consonant would suggest that the second syllable is stressed. Likewise, in writing ‘metre’ and ‘centre’ rather than ‘meter’ and ‘center’, the British are only aping the French, making their language inconsistent and hence difficult for children, dyslexics and foreigners.

Perhaps, as the English language dictionary reaches its millionth word this month, ‘contact lense’ should be accepted as perfect sense? The word ‘sense’ speaks for itself, with more logic being added by words like ‘cleanse’ and ‘tense’. Contact lense? That makes sense.

One lecturer in Buckinghamshire thinks it is time to reconsider the strict, conservative spelling of British English, as he is tired of correcting his students’ spelling in essays. As one third of English 14 year-olds can’t read properly, he suggests, maybe the problem is in the language itself and not amongst the readers.

Professor Vivian Cook agrees that the English language is the tough cookie of linguistics, with grammar being another tricky component for learners to get their heads around. Yet, the language is coherent and works as a whole the way it is, Cook holds firm, and trying to adapt it to reading and writing difficulties would only make it more complicated. If lens has always been lens, then that is what it should be – and ‘contact lense’ is just another of those annoying phrases we need to learn to get rid of.

Other traditionalists argue that etymology has value in itself, and changing the spelling of words to adapt to modern pronunciations and lack of good teaching would be to disrespect their historical context and the sensibility of organic development. Language evolves over time, some linguists react to Tony Papard’s blog post, and words’ spelling will not always make sense when taken out of their historical context. The word ‘photo’, the first comment demands, should hold onto its Greek heritage, and not be simplified into ‘foto’ like some Americans would prefer.

So what does etymology say about ‘contact lense’? Nothing too specific, we would like to suggest. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word ‘lens’ derives from ‘lentil’ after its similarly convex shape. Other dictionaries suggest that ‘lens’ can be traced back to the Latin word ‘lendem’ which has translated into many words such as ‘lentil’, ‘lento’ meaning to bend, and ‘lentesco’ meaning to become soft and flexible. Why this would make ‘contact lens’ more sensible than ‘contact lense’, we don’t know.

Moreover, many are the languages that have held onto the letter e at the end of the word for contact lens, for example the Dutch ‘contact lenze’, the German ‘kontaktlinse’, the Italian ‘lente a contatto’, and the Spanish ‘lente de contacto’. ‘Contact lense’, it seems, would be more internationally viable than ‘contact lens’.

Internationalist or not, behold the first ever dictionary to consider ‘contact lense’ to be the correct spelling, namely Merriam-Webster’s medical dictionary. And as many of our customers search for ‘lense store’ and ‘lense store.co.uk’, we open-mindedly welcome any spelling of ‘contact lens’, or ‘contact lense’, out there. Nearly 7000 contact lense wearers cannot be wrong, right?

Not only is there a divide in the opinion on spelling, but believe it or not, there is actually a rapid growth in the number of people searching Google for phrases like ‘contact lense trial’ and ‘coloured contact lense’, while searches for ‘contact lenses’ and ‘contact lens’ are increasing relatively slowly. In addition, the trend says that ‘contact lense’ is a more popular search phrase in England, Scotland and Wales than in Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands where hardly anyone would use the phrase ‘contact lense’.

Has the Skool Minister has bad influence on us? Or has the computer spell checker made us lazy? Whatever the reason, it seems like things are changing, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see boxes labelled ‘contact lense’ in a decade or two. Open-mindedness, if nothing else, seems like a good place to start.

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