Ax had some good years in the late 20th century, but evidence from multiple corpora shows that axe has once again taken the lead as the 21st century makes its way through its third decade. 'Axe': The Current Championĭespite Noah Webster’s firm conviction on the matter, axe has prevailed as the dominant spelling for most of the years since he deemed the spelling improper. Ax had both going for it: the “e” on axe doesn’t do a thing, and none of the word’s ancestors-not Old English æcs, the Old High German ackus, Latin ascia, or really even Greek axinē argue well for axe as a spelling that’s truer to the word’s ancestry. Webster favored spellings that more closely reflected pronunciation, and if they were backed by etymology, so much the better. If Noah Webster had had his way, the spelling divide would have been as it is with color and colour, theater and theatre, and draft and draught: he defined ax in his 1828 An American Dictionary of the English Language and included the note “improperly written as axe.” This was in direct defiance of Samuel Johnson’s 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language, which wasted no ink on the shorter form but included only axe. While one might expect that ax is the spelling favored in the U.S., and axe the spelling favored elsewhere (as is the case with a number of spelling variants), the situation with ax and axe is different. Both ax and axe refer to the long-handled tool with the heavy metal blade, and both axe and ax feature in figurative use in phrases like “ax/axe to grind” and “take an ax/axe to (something).” Both ax and axe are also used as verbs for actions in which an ax/axe is literally or figuratively applied.