A Word, Please: Going to the theatre, or the theater?
If it were possible to tally up all the moments of my life so far, the top activities would probably be watching "Simpsons" reruns, talking to computers over the telephone, and asking fellow diners, "Are you gonna eat that?"
The activity of "swapping the places of the letter E and the letter R" wouldn't make the top three, yet it would nonetheless rank surprisingly high.
"In theatres now!"
"An exciting night of live theatre."
"The festival will take place in the city centre."
Back when a lot of my work was editing entertainment- and retail-related press releases, I spent an impressive chunk of my week moving the Rs and Es in theatre and centre. When, on occasion, I got to talk to the people behind the spelling choices, I got a glimpse into their reasoning.
Many people think theatre is the correct spelling. Others think the theatre is different from a theater. These folks will tell you that theatre refers to the art of or a venue for live stage performance, but theaters are places where movies are shown.
Still others believe that theatre and centre are simply to be rolled out any time you want to sound fancy.
These reasons fell on deaf ears. I changed the theatres to theaters and the centres to centers anyway but not because they were wrong, per se.
Both theatre and centre are standard spellings in British English. But they also appear in American dictionaries. Webster's New World College Dictionary gives theatre its own entry, where it defines it as a "variant" of theater. As for centre, Webster's notes that it's "chiefly British."
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A Word, Please: Going to the theatre, or the theater?