Quote:
Originally Posted by merlinmaxwell
The (any) English dictionary is merrily a report not instructions for use.
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Well, yes and no. It gives the way to spell a word unless either you couldn't care less or you have an idiosyncratic preference for something different or a point to make about the language, and at least in England "rejector" seems to be pretty much universally employed in electrical contexts.
As G6Tanuki has said, American spellings often have more of historical justification - Walter Savage Landor gave many examples of this early in the 19th century. And the push to regularise spelling still has its opponents - the poet Theodore Enslin considered it to be "common huckstering" and kept to various spellings of his own, such as "lense" for the thing that focusses light. There doesn't seem to be any general reason for the -er/-or variations, even among components "transformor" seems not to exist (yet).
We're clearly under American word surveillance here, though, as not just "lense" and "transformor" get squiggly red lines under them in the paragraph above, but "focusses" and "regularise" too, and as far as I know the former is standard in British English and the latter at the very least a fully accepted alternative.
Paul