Is it blond or blonde?

This question recently came from an Australian English spellcheck dictionary user and I thought it was very interesting. The question was: is the spelling blond or blonde?

Now I have often wondered about this word as well. According to the Macquarie dictionary and the Australian Oxford English dictionary, both words are valid in Australia and it is interesting how they are used.

The word blonde is used to refer to a light haired women. The word blond is used to refer to a light haired man and also light colour hair. This is a rare instance in Australian English where we have a different word for a male and a female.

The following are a couple of examples of usage.

• That means we have blonde jokes and in my experience, not blond jokes.
• The blonde has blond hair.
• When we talk about blondes having more fun, we probably aren't talking about guys, but I'm sure blonds have more fun too.

In this case both the dictionaries are consistent and for the purpose of the Australian English spellcheck dictionary this information means both words will be included in the the full version and the Kelvin version of the dictionary.

What is interesting is usage within Australia according to the Kelvinometer. This tool shows the number of pages returned from search engines for pages from Australia, for two words with different spelling, but the same meaning.

Very interesting is there are about six times more pages returned with "blonde", compared with "blond". This is an enormous difference and a quick check of Google pages shows a great number of people using the words incorrectly.

Perhaps the question then is: are people using the word incorrectly, or has our usage in Australia evolved and the word "blonde" is now the preferred usage?

What do you think?

Kelvin Eldridge - Creator and maintainer of the Australian English spellcheck dictionary files now used by over half a million people.