Dictionary: Is it whiskey, whisky, wisky or wiskey?

The words wisky and wiskey are easy. They are incorrect spelling. The two words whiskey and whisky, are more interesting. A check of the authoritative dictionaries for Australia show whisky to be the preferred spelling in Australia, with whiskey being American and Irish.

Always one to enjoy seeing the language used in the real world, a trip to the local liquor store showed American and Irish whisky used the spelling whiskey, and Scotch whisky used the spelling whisky.

In general, when referring to whisky in Australia, the spelling would be whisky. But if you specifically wanted to refer to Irish or American whisky, then you would use whiskey.

For the Kelvin version of the Australian English spellcheck dictionary and Word Check, you will only find whisky as the preferred Australian English spelling.

- Kelvin

PS. Word Check is a great way to check the preferred Australian English spelling of a word. The Kelvin version of the Australian English spellcheck dictionaries, will be available shortly for many of your favourite programs such as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Opera 10, Firefox, OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and many more.