etymology - Alignment or alinement?
I was reading Wonders of World Aviation the other day, published in the late thirties, and have found a couple of articles where alinement is preferred to alignment. While this seems to make sense, it also appears to be rare:-
Does anyone know how alinement came into being? Was it a (doomed) attempt at spelling reform, or is it just a minority spelling (or mis-spelling)?
Answer
'Alinement' over the years
The OP's Ngram chart vividly illustrates the relative popularity of alinement and alignment during the period from 1800 to 2000. It does not, however, do a very good job of showing how the popularity of alinement changed across the same period. To remedy that shortcoming, I reproduce below the Ngram chart for alinement across the years 1600–2008:
As you can see, alinement was an extremely rare spelling prior to the late 1890s, at which point it began an increase in frequency that continued (with quite a bit of fluctuation) until about 1950; it then entered a period of steady decline in frequency; by 1990 the spelling had fallen in frequency to approximately its 1895 level, where it has since remained.
With regard to early spellings of the word, the earliest match for alinement in my Google search across the years 1600–2008 is from a 1742 translation of The Philosophical History and Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris (1741):
This platform is here represented by 4 pricked lines, and marked A. B. B. A. It is made of 4 pieces of crooked wood, placed end to end, and making together 48 feet in length, and 18 inches in breadth. Its bend is 2 portions of a circle, which meet in the middle of the canal at the points В. B. the centres of which are about 30 feet below, and a little without, its alinement. This canal is here marked by the 2 parallel pricked lines с. с. с. c.
However, the next Google Books match for alinement is from 1788, a year after its first match for alignment, so the practical effect of the the 1742 instance of alinement as a model for how to spell the word seems to have been negligible. Here is the 1788 example, from James Hutton, "Theory of the Earth," part 2 (read April 4, 1785) in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1788):
It must be evident, that, as the crystallization of the sparry structure is the figuring cause of the quartz bodies, there must be observed a certain correspondency between those two things, the alinement (if I may be allowed the expression) of the quartz, and the shining of the sparry ground. It must also appear, that, at the time of congelation of the fluid spar, those two contiguous portions had been differently disposed in the crystallization of their substance.
The earliest Google Books match for alignment is from William Dalrymple, Tacticks (1787):
On the second word of command, the right battalion, and the divisions of the center battalion in front of the division of alignment, face to the right ; the divisions of the center battalion in the rear of the division of alignment, and the left battalion face to the left : On the word, MARCH, the right battalion, and those divisions that have faced to the right, march by the right flank, and when the division of alignment is unmasked by the preceding division, the Officer will order it to HALT.
Perhaps the most notable thing about alinement/alignment is how rare the word was in either spelling until the 1800s, when alignment emerged as the more popular spelling. Neither alinement/alignment nor aline/align appears in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1756), nor in the Jones/Sheridan General Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language, third edition (1798) nor in Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). When the words finally do appear—in Merriam-Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (1847)—the only spellings mentioned are align and alignment.
Two other early variants: 'allignment' and 'allinement'
Google Books search results turn up matches from the late 1700s and early 1800s for three other spellings of the word: allignment, alignement, and allinement.
The earliest confirmed match for allignment appears in Adjutant-General's Office, Rules and Regulations for the Cavalry (1795):
The regiment marches in this column on the wheeling point given by the Lieutenant Colonel to the leading Officer, till it arrives near the flank of its dismounting ground : ... on this ground it marches into the allignment as follows:
As soon as the young horses are shewn, the adjutant takes off two Quarter Masters of the right squadron ; he marks with one of them the wheeling point : and he himself marks the point d'appui where the right of the regiment is to come ; placing the other Quarter Master beyond him on the same line, as the point of allignment[.] The Adjutant and Quarter Masters must stand with their horses' heads fronting the allignment—the column comes trotting on.
Lieutenant Colonel—"THE REGIMENT WILL MARCH INTO THE ALLIGNMENT!"
A number of matches to seemingly earlier instances of this spelling are actually OCR misreadings of the word assignment, spelled with old-fashioned long-s characters.
The variant allinement appears in four different books published from 1809 through 1817. The earliest of these is Joel Barlow, The Columbiad: A Poem (1809):
Where Delaware's wide waves behold with pride/ Penn's beauteous town [Philadelphia] ascending on their side,/ The crossing streets in just allinement run,/ The walls and pavements sparkle to the sun.
Alignement (the preponderant French spelling) shows up in English-language texts from as early as David Dundas, Principles of Military Movements: Chiefly Applied to Infantry (1788):
This will be more difficult for the officers to execute, because they must conduct the leading flank (the right of their platoons), and therefore cannot time their word halt exactly at the instant when the left is on the alignement.
To remedy this—The commander of the fourth battalion having given nearly to his officers of platoons, the direction which they ought to take, stops himself at the point of appui.—From thence he orders the last platoon of his battalion to halt when he sees its left enter the alignement: the officer who conducted it immediately returns to its left, and facing the commander, is by him correctly placed on the distant point D, of the alignement ; the next platoon is also halted and dressed in the alignement in the same manner— ...
None of these variants showed much staying power in English—and Google's Ngram graphing tool declines to map the frequency of allinement or allignment, on the grounds that there are too few matches to support a line graph for either one. (It does provide a line graph for alignement, but most of the matches underlying it are from French texts.) Nevertheless, at least one dictionary—John Boag, A Popular and Complete English Dictionary (1848)—insists that allinement is the only proper spelling of the word, and stray instances of allinement, allignment, and alignement appear occasionally in English-language books written in the past 50 years—for example, in AATCC, Book of Papers (1978), in Miles Kierson, The Transformational Power of Executive Team Allignment (2007), and in Society for Underwater Technology, SUBTECH ’91: Back to the Future (1991).
Less common still is the spelling allignement, which appears repeatedly in, for example, Antonio Barrone, Principles and Applications of Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (1992).
'Alinement' and the simplified spelling movement
One source of multiple matches for alinement near the beginning of its rise in the late 1890s and early 1900s was the Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office. Here's a patent description for an electric fire-alarm circuit and signal-box (September 29, 1896):
In a fire-alarm signaling-box apparatus, in combination a spring-actuated signal-operating wheel, a tripping-lever, a projection or lug moving with said wheel normally in alinement with said tripping-lever, and a pivoted lever adapted when the tripping-lever is operated to swing on its pivot-point and lock said lever, a spring-actuated plunger, a pin moving with the signal-operating wheel in alinement with said plunger when the plunger is free, but out of alinement when the plunger is moved against the spring.
The bundled Patent Office Gazettes for September 1896 contain dozens of instances of the spelling alinement across multiple patent descriptions. Matches from the period 1908–1953 include numerous instances in different issues Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. The spelling also seems to have been unusually common in texts on geology, hydrology, forestry, and military topics.
All of the matches cited above for the 1896–1950 period occur in U.S. publications, lending weight to the idea that rise and fall of alinement during the twentieth century was part of a larger simplified-spelling project that rose and fell during the same period. One significant strand of this movement was the Simplified Spelling Board, but other efforts were undertaken during and after the SSB's crusade. Wikipedia's article on "English-language spelling reform," for example, notes that in 1934 the Chicago Tribune "introduced 80 respelt words, including tho, thru, thoro, agast, burocrat, frate, harth, herse, iland, rime, staf and telegraf." The Tribune didn't entirely abandon this innovation until 1975, though it appears to have abandoned most of the spellings before 1975.
In any event, the instances of alinement you're likely to come across in U.S. publications of the twentieth century are very likely to have been the product of house style sheets and word lists that, for a time, adopted alinement as a simplified spelling of alignment.
Though British English publishers seem not to have embraced spelling simplification with as much enthusiasm as some of their U.S. counterparts did, a similar discussion took place there, as this excerpt from Modern Language Teaching, volume 11 (1915) (a London publication) suggests:
The right method of procedure would rather be to secure public tolerance for certain varieties of spelling. It would be very useful if, with a view to this, some impression could be made on our present idolatry of uniform spelling, if people could be made to understand what a very modern thing it is, and how well our not very remote forefathers got on without it, how words are frequently misspelt in letters and occasionally in print* without the least inconvenience to anybody, and how already some hundreds of vocables in English can be spelt in two or three ways.
*A few weeks ago alignment was spelt alinement in a leading article in the Times. One wonders how many people took any notice of it. Havock appeared recently in another paper.
Conclusions
The words aline/align and alinement/alignment were exceedingly rare until the late 1700s, at which point align and alignment rapidly became the favored spellings, as evidenced by the absence of aline and alinement as variant spellings in the first Webster's dictionary to take notice of the words (the 1847 American Dictionary of the English Language). Other competing variants—including allinement, allignement, and alignement—had some support during the period 1790–1840, but became much less common in English after that.
The appearance of alinement as an alternative spelling in published works during the period from 1896 to 1980 or so seems to have been an outgrowth of a contemporaneous simplified spelling movement that began to lose steam around 1950. I haven't found any evidence to suggest that the upsurge in usage of alinement that began around 1896 was connected to the much earlier (and very rare) use of that spelling in the 1700s before alignment first appeared.
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