When Did We Begin to Spell 'Heteros*Edasticity' Correctly?

Ruhr Economic Paper No. 300

26 Pages Posted: 16 Dec 2011

See all articles by Alfredo R. Paloyo

Alfredo R. Paloyo

Rhine-Westphalia Institute for Economic Research (RWI-Essen); Ruhr University of Bochum; University of Wollongong

Date Written: December 1, 2011

Abstract

Using digitized texts scanned by Google and subjected to optical character recognition, I show that heteroskedasticity overtook heteroscedasticity as the preferred spelling in 2001 and has continued to dominate, except for 2005, up to 2008. The latest trends indicate that writers are moving toward the k variant. However, for words such as homoskedasticity, heteroskedastic, and homoskedastic, the corresponding spellings using c are still overwhelmingly dominant, albeit slowly shifting.

Keywords: heteroskedasticity, culturomics, Google books, econometric orthography, philology

JEL Classification: A20, B19, B29

Suggested Citation

Paloyo, Alfredo R., When Did We Begin to Spell 'Heteros*Edasticity' Correctly? (December 1, 2011). Ruhr Economic Paper No. 300, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1973444 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1973444

Alfredo R. Paloyo (Contact Author)

Rhine-Westphalia Institute for Economic Research (RWI-Essen) ( email )

Hohenzollernstr. 1-3
Essen, 45128
Germany

Ruhr University of Bochum ( email )

Bochum, 44780
Germany

University of Wollongong ( email )

Northfields Avenue
Wollongong, New South Wales 2522
Australia