![]() ![]() publications.Ī usage note under the entry for czar in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fourth edition (2000) offers perhaps the best explanation of this seeming anomaly: preference for tsar:īut the corresponding chart for American English is astonishing:ĭespite being identified as the primary spelling by the Merriam-Webster, Oxford American, American Heritage, and Random House English dictionaries, tsar appears to have held its own against czar for the past century in the Google Books database of U.S. The British English chart for the years 1809–2008 is not surprising, given the U.K. spelling preferences.Īnd yet something very odd occurs when you run Google Books searches for tsar (red line) versus czar (blue line). The spelling czar no doubt also benefits in the United States from being identified as a probable typo under Microsoft Word's default U.S. Tsar, though closer to the Russian form, is archaic.Īnd so does The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law (2002): The spelling czar is overwhelmingly predominant. variant spelling of TSAR etc.įrom Oxford American Dictionary and Thesaurus (2003):īryan Garner, Garner's Modern American Usage, second edition (2003) comes out squarely in favor of the spelling czar:Ĭzar tsar. From Concise Oxford English Dictionary, revised tenth edition (2001)):Ĭzar etc. English is clear from the way the British and American versions of the OED handle the spelling. ![]() That the tendency of reference works to prefer tsar in UK English and czar in U.S. Spelling of the word varies in both British and American dictionaries-neither form is accepted by all authorities in either country. Robert Hendrickson, The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins (1997) offers this remark at the end of its entry for czar tsar tsarina etc.: The question of whether tsar or czar should be viewed as the primary spelling in English is a matter of contention, as various answers and comments here indicate. This has evolved into Serbo-Croat and Bulgarian tsar and Russian tsar'-source of English tsar.īritish and U.S. Tsar Caesar was a Roman cognomen (English gets caesarian from it) and from the days of Augustus was used as part of the title of 'emperor.' The Germanic peoples took it over in this sense (it is the source of German kaiser) and passed it on to prehistoric Slavic as tsēsari. The entry for the term in John Ayto, Arcade Dictionary of Word Origins (1990) focuses exclusively on the derivation of the spelling tsar: The English word czar first appeared in a 1555 translation of Herberstein's work. The c in Herberstein's czar may have come from Polish, but his z was surely added as a pronunciation indicator- z in German, like c in Polish, is pronounced ts. Herberstein wrote in Latin, but his spelling of Russian tsar was influenced by his native German. We owe our peculiar spelling of czar to an Austrian diplomatist, Siegmund, Freiherr (Baron) von Herberstein (1486–1566). The Polish equivalent of Russian tsar is spelled car-Polish c is pronounced ts. It looks rather like a Polish word, and in fact there is a Polish czar, but it is pronounced like English char and means 'charm' or 'spell'. ![]() Tsar is a straightforward borrowing from the Russian, but the form of czar is strange. Webster's Word Histories (1989), in a fairly detailed discussion of the two spellings, attributes the spelling czar to a sixteenth-century Austrian baron:Ĭzar Czar, or tsar, is our English word for a pre-Soviet Russian emperor. Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003) lists czar as the primary spelling in U.S. ![]()
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