Dear Peter With questions like this, we naturally miss Max's expertise. Allow me a few ramblings. While you did take a nice sample of examples from different English speaking countries, they were all from newspapers. In Australia, newspapers have long used the American spellings; they used color, labor, . . . long before other Australians. I found this strange as a kid. In fact, I believe my old Collins Australian Dictionary would have given "r\^ole". The Macquarie Dictionary gives "r\^ole" as a second usage as American influences are growing. The English word, as we know, comes from the French "r\^ole" for roll of paper on which an actor's part was written. It was quite legitimate for Webster to pin down American spelling before it had stabilized in England and before the fashion in England favoured the French spellings such as "programme". I suspect that "r\^ole" was part of that revision. (Funnily, the French at the same time favoured English words and names such as Edith.) So I don't think it is in mathematics especially, except that we are a bit conservative when it comes to language. "Shew" was in my mathematics text books as an undergraduate, and not in any other texts. The typewriter, computer and mobile/cellular phone have also helped eliminate accents (and, unfortunately, apostrophes). Who wants to look at <r\^ole>? Or <ü> or <é> in the way my mailer transforms it to yours? But I do want to preserve the distinctions: between <its> and <it's>, <building's>, <buildings>, and <buildings'> . End of ramble. Ross On 10/10/2007, at 7:04 AM, Peter Selinger wrote:
Does anyone know why it is common, in papers on logic, semantics, and category theory, to spell the word "role" the French way, i.e., with a circumflex accent? I am taking about the idiom "to play a role", as in, "in this definition, x and y play symmetric r\^oles". Sometimes it is also used as in "the r\^ole of x is ...".