The former is just plain wrong in "European" English whereas either
works in "American" English. Looks like a vote for -eable.
>Modern lexicographers usually resolve these issues by looking at
>a large "corpus" of texts, [...]
>AltaVista says "Word count: cachable: 360; cacheable: 1224",
Looks like a vote for the -eable.
>ISO apparently required that English-language standards be spelled
>according to the OED, which prefers "routeing" to "routing". [...]
Looks like a vote for -eable.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> foreach bla ( `egrep 'able$' /usr/dict/words | sed s/able/e/g` )
foreach? egrep '^'$bla'$' /usr/dict/words
foreach? end
e
abuse
advise
appease
decompose
diagnose
dispense
erase
excise
excuse
exercise
extradite
impasse
increase
lie
lose
oppose
pose
practice
purchase
reimburse
revise
singe
suppose
transfuse
transpose
traverse
use
> foreach bla ( `egrep 'eable$' /usr/dict/words | sed s/eable/e/g` )
foreach? egrep '^'$bla'$' /usr/dict/words
foreach? end
acknowledge
agree
arrange
bridge
change
charge
efface
embrace
exchange
gauge
handle
hole
knowledge
manage
marriage
name
notice
peace
place
pronounce
salvage
see
service
shake
trace
whistle
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The obvious pattern here is that -able is suffixed to words ending in
-se whereas -eable is suffixed to nearly all the others.
Besides if cacheable things are kept in a cache a lot, surely
cachable things would be kept in a cachalot, which is not a good place
for my data! =:-)
-- Rob.
.-. Robert.Harley@inria.fr .-.
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`-' Linux + 500MHz Alpha + 256MB SDRAM = heaven `-'