Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Is the spelling trademark or trade mark in Australia?

I've been assisting a site with SEO with terms like Property Lawyers MelbourneIntellectual Property Lawyer and Conveyancing Melbourne, but one thing that stopped me in my tracks I found quite interesting was the spelling of trademark versus trade mark.

I've seen both the spelling trademark and trade mark used so I thought it was time to investigate. Now here's where our language gets tricky. On checking the Australian Oxford dictionary and the Macquarie Dictionary (version 5), both have the main spelling as trademark and the also spelling as trade mark. As a general rule if both of these authoritative references agree it's often a good indication of the correct spelling. In this case however the authoritative references don't agree with Australian usage and the government sites. In particular you would think if the government sites which maintain the trade marks use the spelling as two words, that would be a good indicator. General usage in Australia by using the Search Australia tool I wrote, which only returns results for .au domain (plus some other specified sites), also shows the general use is two words.

It also appears the usage varies across the world. For example the government sites in the UK, Canada, USA and Australia use trade mark, trademark, trademark and trade mark respectively.

Unfortunately this leaves us in a situation where the authoritative references are in conflict with the usage by the government and general Australian usage. This isn't a situation I see often. At this point until I can resolve this I really need to stick with the current spelling in my dictionary files. That is that trademark is a valid spelling and since the two words trade and mark and also individually correctly spelt, then both spelling variations will be considered correct. It does however mean I'll need to investigate further.

I'm not a betting person, but if I were, then I'd place my bet on trade mark as the correct spelling, or should I say, the preferred Australian English spelling. However I think it is best to withhold judgement until further investigation is undertaken.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.Australian-Dictionary.com.au
Creator of the preferred Australian English spelling dictionary files.


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