“Aluminium”

I’ve just finished a book called The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements, by Sam Kean. It’s highly recommended, as Kean makes this ostensibly abstruse subject come alive, even for a complete non-scientist like me. But I bring it up here for another reason, the way Kean (an American) spells one of the elements: “aluminium.”

The metal’s history is fascinating. It was discovered in the early 1800s and for decades was more precious than silver or gold, because of the difficulty of extracting it. At first there was no consensus on what it should be called . Then, in 1811, following the model of potassium, magnesium, sodium, and many other elements, a scientist proposed “aluminium,” and it stuck. But not for long, or, rather, not for long in the United States. First, Noah Webster, in his 1828 An American Dictionary of the English Language, endorsed “aluminum.”

But the “-num” spelling really took off in the U.S. in the 1890s, as this Google Ngram Viewer graph of American usage shows. (The blip in the 1830s is presumable due to Webster.)

The rise and subsequent dominance is probably due to the influence of Charles Hall. In 1886, as a young freelance scientist, Hall discovered a cheap and easy way to extract the element. He went on to found the Aluminum Company of America, aka Alcoa, and become fabulously rich. Sam Kean reports that when Hall applied for patents on the process he’d discovered, he used the “aluminium” spelling.

“However, when advertising his shiny metal, Hall was looser with his language. There’s debate about whether cutting the i was intentional or a fortuitous mistake on advertising fliers, but when Hall saw ‘aluminum,’ he thought it a brilliant coinage. He dropped the vowel permanently, and with it a syllable, which aligned his product with classy platinum. His new metal caught on so quickly and grew so economically important that ‘aluminum’ became indelibly stamped on the American psyche. As always in the United States, money talks.”

Meanwhile “aluminium” held fast in the rest of the world, and in the scientific community. (In Britain, interestingly, “aluminum” has shown some growth in the past several decades.)

Admittedly, other than its use by Kean, “aluminium” is a marginal Not One-off Britishism. A search for that spelling in the New York Times archives yields 2901 hits, but the majority are from before 1910 or so, which seems to be roughly when the newspaper’s own style changed. Recent uses tend to be from articles about British football on the Athletic website or quotes from non-Americans, such as the British anti-vaxer Christopher Exley:

“In an email to the New York Times last week, Dr. Exley wrote, ‘Secretary Kennedy asks my advice on aluminium in adjuvants as I am the leading authority on human exposure to aluminium.'”

The British spelling did slip in in April 2025, in a graphic accompanying an article on tariffs.

But given that the graphic’s heading and the note on the bottom use “-num,” I’m pretty sure that was a one-off.