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Is the spelling trademark or trade mark in Australia? - Australian spelling
I've been assisting a site with SEO with terms like "Property Lawyers Melbourne",
"Intellectual Property Lawyer" and "Conveyancing Melbourne",
but one thing that stopped me in my tracks that I found quite interesting,
was the spelling of trademark versus trade mark.
I've seen both the spelling trademark and trade mark used, so I thought it was time to investigate.
Now here's where our language gets tricky.
On checking the Australian Oxford dictionary and the Macquarie Dictionary (version 5),
both have the main spelling as trademark and the also spelling as trade mark.
As a general rule if both of these authoritative references agree.
it's often a good indication of the correct spelling.
In this case however the authoritative references don't agree with the government sites.
In particular you would think if the government sites which maintain the trade marks
use the spelling as two words, that would be a good indicator.
General usage in Australia appears to be trademark as one word.
It also appears the usage varies across the world. For example the government sites in the UK,
Canada, USA and Australia use trade mark, trademark, trademark and trade mark respectively.
Unfortunately this leaves us in a situation where the authoritative references of the Macquarie dictionary
and the Oxford dictionary, which have trademark as the primary spelling and trade mark as the secondary spelling,
are in conflict with the usage by the government.
This isn't a situation I see often.
This feels like the same issue of judgment/judgement where the legal groups use one spelling and
the general population use the preferred Australian spelling. There's not much you can do except
if you're dealing with a government body, is to use their preferred spelling. Not ideal, but
probably necessary.
Kelvin Eldridge
www.Australian-Dictionary.com.au
Creator of the preferred Australian English spelling dictionary files.
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