An "extra" e also occurs in some words taken from other languages such as German ( chorale, ketone). There are other words from French that don't refer to female people, but have definitely have gained an e, such as morale, locale, ladrone (the last one seems to be also taken from Spanish ladrón). If this is the actual origin of the spelling, I guess it would make it doubly erroneous now, since in modern usage the word is often gender-neutral.īut it's not clear that the e was intended to be a feminine termination. Spell it chaperone, apparently under the supposition that it requires Surprisingly to me, the Oxford English dictionary treats "chaperone" as merely a common error for "chaperon", not even listing it alongside the other variant spellings such as chapperoon, shaparoon, shaparowne. (I excluded the spoken sections.) So there are clearly some differences across time and space, but chaperon is actually older or more British or both it's definitely not a new American simplified spelling. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) has 277 instances of chaperone and 60 instances of chaperon from 1990 to 2015. The BYU-BNC British National Corpus has 32 instances of chaperon and 32 of chaperone from the 1980s to 1993. The corpora I checked indicate that both forms are used on both sides of the Atlantic.
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