By Dave Knight
An interesting word collectible it can be spelt collectable also. It is a noun meaning “Things considered to be worth collecting (not necessarily valuable or antique)” or an adjective meaning “That which can be collected: a collectible loan” or “Worthy of being collected: collectible antique coins”. For the purposes of this article it is it’s meaning as a something valuable that is of interest. What is deemed collectable isn’t necessarily valuable monetarily but is valuable to the collector due to its satisfaction value. But I digress.
In my research of the word I discovered some interesting facts. Collectable is the spelling listed first in the Oxford English Dictionary, the dictionary notes that the -ible form is also valid, and is more commonly used in the United States. This fact probably explains the following search results.
I found that the use of collectible or collectibles was almost five times as popular as collectable or collectables. A search of Google for each word revealed that there were over forty four million sites containing the word collectible but under ten million containing the alternative spelling.
So there you have it. The USA has the largest number of Internet sites hence the greater number of sites using the -ible form of the word but both spellings are correct.
Useful Links:
Cambridge Dictionaries On-Line
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