When did the US choose sulfur over sulphur ?

[gman2304]

Interestingly, why the change from 'sulphur' to 'sulfur' occurred in the United States during the early part of the twentieth century remains something of a mystery, as other 'ph' words have persevered in American English.

Language is our servant, not our master and it evolves to meet our needs. And in the case of sulfur, there seems to be no good reason to continue using the 'ph' form other than perhaps a mistaken sense of spelling jingoism.


^ From Nature.com ^

 

[y_p_w]

Originally Posted By: 2015_PSD
As far as I can remember in the US, at least back to the 1970s, element #16, has always been spelled sulfur, but in the UK and other places outside the US it has been sulphur. With that said, I grew up near Sulphur, Louisiana which was named after some nearby sulfur mines. Go figure...

There's a geothermal area in Lassen Volcanic National Park here in California named Sulphur Works. They've got mud pots and steam vents that go through sulfur deposits. And yeah - it does smell like it.

http://www.ohranger.com/lassen-volcanic/poi/sulphur-works-trail

 

[Shannow]

Originally Posted By: gman2304
Language is our servant, not our master and it evolves to meet our needs. And in the case of sulfur, there seems to be no good reason to continue using the 'ph' form other than perhaps a mistaken sense of spelling jingoism.


no problems there, IMO, we can drop "j" from the alfabet like it used to be...makes magic squares way eafier too.

 

[Silk]

We have to deal with F, PH, and WH.

 

[Shannow]

Yes silk...yours is way worse than ours, and we are lucky "ghoti" is spelled much more easily than it could have been.

 

[4WD]

Texas Gulf Sulphur extracted from a massive deposit for most of the 20th century ...

 

[Silk]

Originally Posted By: Shannow
Yes silk...yours is way worse than ours,


Yeah, the joke about the lost tribe who doesn't know where the whauk they are, or the Kiwi that eats roots and leaves...you can shift them to another culture, but it loses our in joke.

 

[weasley]

Go Filadelfia Eagles!!
How 'bout those Miami Dolfins?!

Here is Wikipedia's take on it:

Originally Posted By: Wikipedia
Sulfur is derived from the Latin word sulpur, which was Hellenized to sulphur. The spelling sulfur appears toward the end of the Classical period. (The true Greek word for sulfur, [Greek characters can't be displayed];, is the source of the international chemical prefix thio-.) In 12th-century Anglo-French, it was sulfre; in the 14th century the Latin ph was restored, for sulphre; and by the 15th century the full Latin spelling was restored, for sulfur, sulphur. The parallel f~ph spellings continued in Britain until the 19th century, when the word was standardized as sulphur.[7] Sulfur was the form chosen in the United States, whereas Canada uses both. The IUPAC adopted the spelling sulfur in 1990, as did the Nomenclature Committee of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1992, restoring the spelling sulfur to Britain.[8] Oxford Dictionaries note that "in chemistry and other technical uses … the -f- spelling is now the standard form for this and related words in British as well as US contexts, and is increasingly used in general contexts as well."