2349: Aluminum vs. Aluminium May 24, 2021

It's well known that the North American spelling and pronunciation of 'aluminum' differs from that of Britain's 'aluminium', but whether to use -i- or not may not really be the most interesting part of this spelling: it was originally just 'alumium' with no -n-. This is because the word is from Latin 'alumen', a name not for the metal but for the chemical compound known in English as 'alum' (not directly etymologically related) and into the 19th century it was the English, not Latin, where the name was taken from for a resultant 'alumium'.

The difference between the North American and British spellings came after the name was changed to keep with the convention of using Latin roots. For some time the -um and -ium were used interchangeably even by the same individuals, but the British scientific opinion was that it didn't appear to sound as classical, but in America -ium was at first actually more popular anyway. Both of these terms had variant levels of popularities in the respective regions but the current situation was more or less established by the turn of the 20th century.