Treasurys vs. Treasuries — Which is the right spelling?

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What’s the right way to spell the plural of Treasury, as in U.S. Treasury bond?

Should it be “Treasurys,” following the rule that the members of the Murphy family become Murphys? Or should it follow the normal rules of creating plurals for words that end in the letter y?

I panicked when I saw “Treasurys” in The Wall Street Journal. Eek! Have I been spelling the word wrong for 20-odd years?

However, I quickly discovered that opinions are split. When I Googled the terms, there were 2.2 million results for Treasuries vs. only 1.5 million for Treasurys. 

The evidence for Treasuries
Here’s the rule that would typically apply. “…if a word ends in a -y that isn’t preceded by a vowel, the plural is formed by omitting the -y and substituting -ies…,” according to Garner’s Modern American Usage. Garner makes an exception for proper names ending in y. He agrees that Murphy becomes Murphys.

Does Treasury qualify as a proper name? Proper names are usually personal names–such as Murphy–or geographic names–such as Washington, D.C. Following this reasoning, Treasuries makes sense.

My friend, financial editor Harriett Magee, found that sources including the Barron’s Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms agreed with Treasuries. Plus, her spell-checker flagged Treasurys as a mistake. 

If you prefer Treasurys…
You’ve got some high-powered company if you stick with Treasurys. When The Wall Street Journal spells it that way, that legitimizes it in my eyes.

If you can’t bear not knowing what’s 100% correct, then use the workaround that Harriett Magee suggests. Refer to Treasury bonds, Treasury notes, and so on. It’s bit wordy, but correct. 

Follow this advice, no matter what you decide
It’s important to use your words consistently in your corporate communications. Pick one spelling and stick with it. 

Consider creating a corporate style guide that lists preferred spellings. It’s a lot easier to have an authoritative source for your company than to try to keep the rules in your head.

My thanks go to David Glen for raising this question when he was a senior vice president at Boston Private Bank.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

 

Note: updated on Nov. 15, 2024. This post was originally published in 2010.

MISTAKE MONDAY for May 27: Can YOU spot what’s wrong?

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Can you spot what’s wrong in the image below? Please post your answer as a comment. This mistake jumped out at me. Did it catch your eye quickly?

Mistake Monday reigns reins
I post these challenges to raise awareness of the importance of proofreading.

How do you spell it? “Out-performance” vs. “outperformance”

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The browser’s spellchecker keeps tagging “outperformance” as a typo. I feel very annoyed when this happens because I The prefix out- should be united with whatever follows, just as bride and groom should be united.believe it’s wrong. This spurred me to do research on the correctness of my assumption.

The case for “outperformance”

Here’s the evidence in favor of marrying “out” and “performance” so they’re one word:

  1. “Generally do not hyphenate when using a prefix with a word that starts with a consonant,” said The Associated Press Stylebook, when I originally researched this question some years ago. More recently, the online AP Stylebook says, “Follow Webster’s New World College Dictionary.” The dictionary includes “outperform” without a hyphen.
  2. Words into Type says, “The modern tendency is to eliminate the hyphen between a prefix and a root unless the root is a proper noun or adjective, such as un-American.”
  3. I asked, “What would The Wall Street Journal do?” as suggested in my financial jargon killer blog post. At a quick glance, the newspaper appears to favor “outperform.”

The case for “out-performance” with a hyphen

I mustered one piece of  evidence in favor of hyphenating “out-performance” when I originally researched this post. Google yielded more than 931 million search results for “out-performance” vs. only 1.01 million for “outperformance.” It’s strange that the first four results use the spelling “outperformance,” as you see in the screen shot on the left.

I found a similar discrepancy between the number of search results for “outperformance” versus “out-performance” and the spelling in the actual search results when I repeated my search in March 2024. However, the gap between the number of search results shrank to 5.6 million for the hyphenated word versus 5 million for the unhyphenated word.

Results of my spelling poll

When I polled my newsletter and blog readers about the proper spelling, “outperformance” won in a landslide, with 92% of the vote. Here are the results:

  • Outperformance: 92%
  • Out-performance: 0
  • Out performance: 8%

 

 

Note: This post was updated again on March 22, 2024. I updated this piece on December 1, 2013, to share the results of my poll, instead of directing readers to a poll that’s no longer active. This post originated as a request for readers to respond to a poll.

MISTAKE MONDAY for November 27: Can YOU spot what’s wrong?

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Can you spot what’s wrong in the image below? Please post your answer as a comment.

Oh, I felt so tempted to make a snarky comment about this mistake!
Mistake Monday shear sheer
I post these challenges to raise awareness of the importance of proofreading.

MISTAKE MONDAY for October 30: Can YOU spot what’s wrong?

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Can you spot what’s wrong in the image below? Please post your answer as a comment.

Oops, someone didn’t proofread this survey carefully.
Mistake Monday traditonal traditional
I post these challenges to raise awareness of the importance of proofreading.

MISTAKE MONDAY for September 25: Can YOU spot what’s wrong?

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Can you spot what’s wrong in the image below? Please post your answer as a comment.

If I let this error sneak through, I’d be crying.
Mistake Monday surviver survivor
I post these challenges to raise awareness of the importance of proofreading.

MISTAKE MONDAY for August 28: Can YOU spot what’s wrong?

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Can you spot what’s wrong in the image below? Please post your answer as a comment.

This mistake made me laugh, but it’s not funny if your clients spot mistakes like this.
Mistake Monday roll role BillW
I post these challenges to raise awareness of the importance of proofreading.

MISTAKE MONDAY for May 29: Can YOU spot what’s wrong?

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Can you spot what’s wrong in the image below? Please post your answer as a comment.

I love this photo, but I don’t like the typo.
Mistake Monday scuplted sculped
I post these challenges to raise awareness of the importance of proofreading.

MISTAKE MONDAY for April 24: Can YOU spot what’s wrong?

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Can you spot what’s wrong in the image below? Please post your answer as a comment.

I think this month’s mistake is pretty easy to spot.
Mistake Monday subsribe subscribe

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I post these challenges to raise awareness of the importance of proofreading.

“Investable” or “investible”–which spelling is correct?

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How should you spell the word that may appear in descriptions of an asset management firm’s minimum requirements for clients—“investable” or “investible”?

My gut tells me “investable” with “a” because the definition depends on how much you are able to invest.

The case for “investable” over “investible”

    1. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary includes “investable,” but not the alternative spelling. The same is true on Merriam-Webster.com, which AP style uses along with Garner’s (see #2 below) to justify its preference for “investable,” according to its “Ask the Editor” column.  CollinsDictionary.com lists “investable” first, with “investible” as an alternative. Words  into Type, an older reference book, says, “The correct spelling of words with the terminations -able or -ible is often puzzling. The student of orthography can find rules for the use of these endings, but it is more practical to learn the spelling of each word and refer to the dictionary if memory fails for the moment.”
    2. Garner’s Modern American Usage calls “-ible”  “dead as a combining form in English,” while “-able” is a living suffix that may be added to virtually any verb without an established suffix.”  It includes “investable” among “some of the hundreds of adjectives preferably spelled -able.” Grammarist.com explains: “Unlike –able, -ible isn’t used to make new words. It exists only in words retained from earlier stages of English.”
    3. The world is moving away from “investible” toward “investable,” at least as shown by Google Books Ngram data for the U.S. and the U.K. GrammarHow.com’s “Investible or Investable – Which Is Correct? (UK vs. US)” (unfortunately, the post is no longer online) looks at the Google Books Ngram for the two terms. It shows that the use of “investable” has grown steadily in U.S. books, while the use of “investible” has declined since 1950. In the U.K., “investible” initially dominated, but it has fallen below “investable” in the twenty-first century.

The case for “investible” over “investable”

  1. A Google search turns up more references to “investible” than to “investable,” and the imbalance has only gotten worse since I originally researched this back in 2010. Back then, I found about 393,000 references to “investible” vs. only 320,000 to “investable.”  By 2020, the disparity was 2.79 million to 29.6 million. I don’t know how to explain these results, which contrast with the Google Books Ngram results discussed above.
  2. Fowler’s Modern English Usage says “The –ible form is the natural one for words derived from Latin verbs ending –ere or –ire, making adjectives in –ibilis.” I don’t know about “making adjectives in –ibilis,” but lo and behold, my dictionary says the word “invest” comes from the Latin investire. However, my copy of Fowler’s dates back to the 1960s.
  3. The Financial Times Lexicon went with “investible” when I originally researched this question in 2010 (sorry, the Lexicon link no longer works). I wondered if this could be a British thing, as Fowler’s is also British. However, when I searched the Financial Times website in 2022, instances of “investable” outnumbered “investible,” 965 to 193. This is consistent with the Google Books Ngram trend discussed above.

The SEC is a draw

A search of the SEC website yielded an equal number of results for both spellings. I wonder if it uses both as key words for search purposes.

The FINRA website gives “investable” a slight edge over “investible,” 108 to 98.

Do the two words have different meanings?

A reader suggested to me that the two words have different meanings:

Investible refers to an asset in which an investment can be made.

Investable refers to an asset that can be used to make an investment.

In ordinary usage, cash is investable but not investible, while shares are investible but not investable.

That’s an interesting theory. I haven’t found evidence in dictionaries to support it.

Still, the Nasdaq.com glossary shows only “investible” and defines it in the first sense listed above. However, a Nasdaq website search shows only four results using “investible” versus 24 for “investable.”

The bottom line: You should define your terms for your readers whether you use “investable” or “investible,” especially when the meaning isn’t clear from the context.

 

 

Note: I updated this blog post in 2015 to delete an outdated reference to an inactive poll. I expanded the post in October 2022 and updated it again in March 2023.