Why am is the word "jewelry" incorrectly spelled "jewlery" recently in some esteemed publications?
Asked by
jca2 (
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August 18th, 2023
Yesterday, I was sitting in the local public library and reading the New York Times magazine from 8/8/2023, which was about the evolution of hip hop in recent history. They had an article about bling, showing some jewelry pieces that hip hop and rap artists have worn. The headline of the printed article spelled “jewelry” as “jewlery.” I was surprised that this mistake made it past the editors, especially because it was a headline and the New York Times is usually better than that.
This morning at home, online, I went to the NY Times site and put “jewlery” into the search, and about 60 hits came up. When I googled the spelling, thinking maybe there was a spelling out there that I’m not aware of, I found the two correct spellings, “jewelry” and jewellry” which is the UK spelling, but nothing showing “jewlery.” When I look now at the online NY Times article about hip hop blind, they have corrected the spelling of “jewelry.”
Why would the incorrect spelling have made it past editors 60 times, as noted above? This is surprising to me, as it’s not an uncommon word.
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12 Answers
Sad to say, a lot of new reporters don’t have editors – they write stuff and then post it. So it’s totally within reason that no editor ever laid eyes on the text that was written.
My local paper is the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Many times – as recently as a month ago – I will use the reporter’s email address and tell them that misspelled a word, that they left out a word, that a sentence wasn’t fully formed – basic simple errors that an editor would have caught. [I gave up – if I did this seriously I would write an email every couple of days to the newspaper]
My guess is that newspapers and magazines see the role of editor as ‘overhead’ and don’t really care about the accuracy (and literacy) of what they publish.
On the other side of the coin, the diamond district in NYC (around W 46th and 47th streets) is largely run by Orthodox Jews. So may “Jewlery” is more accurate than originally thought.
Typo. I catch typos in very well respected publications. Luckily, I almost never see them in the articles my company writes for NYT or any of the other outlets. We have excellent editors. We haven’t written for the Times in a while.
Your search is likely going to pull up articles with the word spelled correctly. Searches seem better now at ignoring minor typos.
They don’t know how to spell the root word jewel.
@JLeslie When I type “jewlery” in the NY Times search, I get about 60 hits for it spelled the way I am searching. If you subscribe to the NY Times, you should try it.
@jca2 That’s interesting. I’ll log in later. Is it searching only the NYT?
@JLeslie Google “NYT: jewlery” .
Just cut and paste what is inside the quotation marks.
@JLeslie It’s the search on the NY Times site, so yes, it’s searching only the NY Times.
Ok, at the risk of sounding way politically incorrect…is it possible that the word jewlery is a new spelling coined by hip-hop musicians? It just sounds like something that they would invent, like other words, none of which I can think of right now.
@smudges I was thinking maybe it was a new spelling, which was why I googled it this morning. I did find it on the TImes search but not elsewhere (via Google).
When I looked at the NY Times article online, the one about hip hop bling that had “jewlery” in the headline, online it’s corrected to the proper spelling so it tells me they caught it after publication.
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