Existance or Existence?

Jan Krohn said:

Wiktionary lists it as spelling mistake. Latin: existere. Existance doesn't make sense...

Seems to be a common mistake though; even Melville, Thoreau and Arthur Conan Doyle misspelled it.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/search/Search.aspx?By=0&SearchBy=4&q=Existance

I wonder if its an american english vs english from england difference. Doyle was english IIRC, and perhaps melville. Thoreau may have simply spent too much time with nature, and not enough with a dictionary.

StephenMcC said:

But C S Lewis (Collected Letters) uses it 9 times with "existance" (and he knew a bit about the English language!).

But don't forget this letter to the Times Educational Supplement!

Sir,—

Nearly everything I have ever read about spelling reform assumes from the outset that it is necessary for us all to spell alike. Why?

We got on for centuries without an agreed common orthography. Most men of my age remember censoring the letters of soldiers and know that even the wildest idiosyncrasies of spelling hardly ever made them unintelligible. Printing houses will always have, as they have now, their own rules, whether authors like them or not. Scholars, who know the ancestry of the words they use, will generally spell them accordingly. A few hard words will still have to be learned by everyone. But for the rest, who would be a penny the worse if though and tho, existence and existance, sieze, seize and seeze were all equally tolerated?

If our spelling were either genuinely phonetic or genuinely etymological, or if any reform that made it either the one or the other were worth the trouble, it would be another matter. As things are, surely Liberty is the simple and inexpensive ‘Reform’ we need? This would save children and teachers thousands of hours’ work. It would also force those to whom applications for jobs are made to exercise their critical faculties on the logic and vocabulary of the candidate instead of tossing his letter aside with the words ‘can’t even spell.’

C. S. Lewis

Lewis had quite idiosyncratic spelling at times. For example, in his letters he often spells "Tuesday" as "Teusday", partly (I presume) because that's how it was sometimes spelt in the 16th century.

Mark Barnes said:

Nearly everything I have ever read about spelling reform assumes from the outset that it is necessary for us all to spell alike. Why?

Even Lewis was wrong once in a while.

-Donnie

We should remember before the time of Noah Webster there was little standardization of spelling in the English language.

American Dictionary of the English Language by Noah Webster    (1828 Edition)