08-20-2014, 09:47 PM
Hijack;
Quote:Canceled vs. cancelled
In American English, the verb cancel is usually inflected canceled and canceling—with one l. This is not a rule, however, and exceptions are easily found. In varieties of English from outside the U.S., including Canadian, British, and Australian English, cancelled and cancelling are the preferred spellings.
The spelling distinction extends to cancelers and cancellers, as well as to cancelable and cancellable, but it does not not extend to cancellation, which everywhere is spelled with two l’s.
As the Ngram below shows, American English has only recently adopted the one-l spellings of canceled, canceling, etc., and the change is not fully engrained in the American language. In web searches of American publications covering the last couple of years, cancelled and cancelling still appear about once for every five instances of canceled and canceling. Outside the U.S., meanwhile, the one-l spellings appear only very rarely. This is true even in Canada, which is usually friendlier to American spelling idiosyncrasies than is the rest of the English-speaking world.

