Sherbert or Sherbet?

I can't tell you how many times this comes up in everyday conversations...and finally I found an article about it!!

Sherbet With No R-tificial Ingredients

Written by Anu Garg for Encarta.

A few weeks back I was reading a bedtime story to my elementary-school daughter, Ananya, when we came across the word sherbert.

"It's spelled incorrectly. It should be sherbet," I said.

"Uh-uh, it's correct. That's how everyone in my class says it," she said.

Never missing an opportunity to talk about a word, I launched into a little history lesson for sherbet. The word is from Arabic, but it took a scenic route to English. It stopped by Persian and Turkish before reaching the shores of the English language. In Arabic šarbat is a drink. (By the way, the word syrup is a cousin of this word.)

"You can confirm the spelling with your dictionary," I added.

"But sherbert is right. Everyone in my class says sherbert," she said.

With her insistence and majority logic, she unwittingly described how human languages really work. The biggest, the greatest or the heaviest dictionaries are no match for public opinion when it comes to language. A language is a very democratic thing -- it goes where its speakers take it.

In spite of what many people believe, dictionaries are supposed to follow the language, not the other way round. In fact, that's exactly how dictionaries are made: by observing and recording how people are using words. Every time you say or write a word, whether it's cursing or a three-page letter or a one-line e-mail, you are casting a vote for how language should move. You are marking a ballot for what a word should mean and how it should be pronounced.

You can't see the effect over a year or two, but what are a couple of years when it comes to the flow of language? Over hundreds of years the changes are easy to see.

So how did we get from sherbet to sherbert? When we borrow a word from another language, we often naturalize its spelling and sound (in Italian sherbet becomes sorbetto, in French sorbet). There are not many everyday words in English that follow the pattern of sherbet, but there's plenty of company for the -bert ending: Herbert, Robert, Albert, Dilbert, etc.

It may be tempting to think that the "misspelling" of this word is a new thing, but it has been with us for almost as long as the word has been around. The word sherbet landed in the English language about 400 years ago, and people were spelling it as sherbert soon after that. Many dictionaries (including Encarta's) list both spellings of the word, though some do look askance at the extra r.

Sherbert or sherbet, it still is the same refreshing frozen dessert (or, if you're in the United Kingdom, chilled drink). When it comes to purity, it's better to insist it's in the food than in the language.