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Comment by hvdijk | Hacker News Reader

No, it wasn't. Merriam Webster includes shitake as a less common but valid spelling.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shitake

This reminds me of a professor who while reviewing a paper of mine, circled a word in red ink and said “not a word”. So I brought in my dictionary and pointed to the word, and said see?

They then told me that Merriam-Webster is shit, and I should be using the American Heritage dictionary: https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=shitake+&sub...

I wonder what your professor's opinion on OED is. It includes shitake.

https://www.lexico.com/definition/shiitake (note the "also shitake")

OED is a great reference, but not really normative for the US.

Remember that this started with "This one wouldn’t have been censored if it was spelt correctly :)" There is nothing about the US in there, only about correct vs incorrect spelling.

That's just institutionalized mediocrity, it's only valid because enough people spell foreign words poorly that you just have to deal.

Do you have any support for your position that that is a poor spelling? There are multiple ways in active use of transliterating Japanese. One of them involves writing shi+i as shii to produce shiitake, which is then left as is. Another one of them involves writing shi+i as shī to produce shītake. As ī involves a marker English does not have, it gets dropped when used in English. Both make sense.

The dictionary’s job is to describe you how words are used, not prescribe definitions.

Unfortunately it is often cited for the latter purpose.

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