dictionaries - Are published books to be considered an official reference for spelling?





Regulatory bodies and authoritative dictionaries for English



Many times I searched across several books for the usage of some words and many times I've found my results quite contradictory. For example, if you look for the plural of "sorry" you will find many dictionaries that don't even consider "sorries" or "sorrys" as a word, but you can find others that do, and/or find many references in books to such terms (both of them in this case).


So, which one to believe?
And how is one to back that decision up?


Try this case:
sorries
sorrys
and you won't find any of those terms in the Collins English Dictionary for example.



Answer



There is really no "official" source for the English language, but there are sources that are generally well-respected and well-accepted. For spelling, that would be the common dictionaries - Collins, Merriam-Webster, Oxford, etc.


While one would hope that all book publishers would hold their books to the same standards, mistakes slip through and some authors might deliberately mis-use/mis-spell words for effect. So I wouldn't trust any old book to be an authoritative source for spelling.


In your particular case, sorry is considered an adjective in every dictionary I checked, so a plural form - be it sorrys or sorries - doesn't make any sense. I understand how people use it, but it's a made-up word so spell it however you like.


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