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Comment by spondyl | Hacker News Reader

For those confused as to why half the comments have "misspelled" referrer, here's an interesting bit of history:

The misspelling of referrer originated in the original proposal by computer scientist Phillip Hallam-Baker to incorporate the field into the HTTP specification. The misspelling was set in stone by the time of its incorporation into the Request for Comments standards document RFC 1945; document co-author Roy Fielding has remarked that neither "referrer" nor the misspelling "referer" were recognized by the standard Unix spell checker of the period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer#Etymology

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It seems like the two spellings were used interchangeably until about 1960:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=referer%2C+ref...

Edit: Actually, that doesn't seem to be true -- although there's some usage of "referer" in English, most of the hits in Google Books prior to 1960 turn out to be for the Old French word "referer".

> Phillip Hallam-Baker

Funny how the misspelling of a double consonant comes from someone who has a misspelt given name with an extra double consonant!

In the U.S., apparently both "Phillip" and "Philip" are equally popular: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/

Edit: I'm glad you made this comment. I only know people with the name "Phillip" but I constantly find myself double-checking how their name is spelt before I refer to them (in text). I chalked it up to me being a bad friend but I guess it doesn't help that I might be seeing enough of the "Philip" variation to get confused.

Popularity and correctness are often confused, especially online :)

Except spelling is a popularity contest with the one in largest use being considered the way to spell it.

I don't think you can ever describe a person's name as spelled correctly or incorrectly. It's spelled how they spell it. It's their name, not a dictionary's. Variations in spelling are perfectly natural and for names in particular are incredibly common

Or how their parents spelt it.

I'm not "attacking" their parents who chose the name or anything like that, and any spelling is fine for a name, but there is a clear etymology to the name "Philip" that comes from "philos" and "hippos", someone who loves horses, and an indisputably historically correct way to spell it.

That a misspelling has become particularly common (or like for my own name, much more common than the historically correct spelling) doesn't make it anymore correctly spelt than "referer" in my opinion.

But if you disagree with the term "misspelling", I can formulate it another way: let's say that it's funny how the creative modern spelling "referer" instead of the historical "referrer" comes from someone who has a creatively spelt name "Phillip" where "Philip" was historically more common, and that both differ from the historical spelling on a double consonant. It's a much more awkward sentence though for such a trivial, passing remark.

I think it's being argued that describing a name variation as a "misspelling" -- as in, a mistake -- is incorrect. What does the etymology or historical popularity of "Philip" have to do with it? We don't know that he has that name because he truly loves horses or because his parents attempted to honor a king of Macedonia.

I know this is treading into the classic prescriptive vs. descriptive linguistic debate, but the reason why we can call "referer" a misspelling -- rather than a creative decision - is because the original authors seem to admit that it was unintentional. Fewer folks would be calling it a misspelling if the authors had meant to do it, e.g. to avoid a name collision with some other attribute named "referrer" or to honor a colleague named "Referer".

Always wondered. Thanks!

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