Enquire vs. inquire

Enquire and inquire are different spellings of the same word. Inquire is more common in all modern English varieties. In North America, enquire is considered an unnecessary variant. Enquire is not so rare outside North America, but inquire is still far more common. 

Some make this distinction for British English: that enquire and its derivatives apply to informal queries, and inquire and its derivatives to formal investigations. But this is not consistently borne out in practice.

The spelling preference extends to all derivatives of inquire/enquire, including inquiry/enquiry, inquirer/enquirer, inquiring/enquiring, etc. Most publications choose the i- version.

Examples

Here are a few examples from around the English-speaking world:

At least one job-seeker called Bannon the next morning to politely inquire if he had, indeed, taken the resumes with him. [The Connecticut Mirror]

Gratl told the inquiry earlier that the federal government’s application is too broad. [Vancouver Sun]

A criminal inquiry into phone-hacking at the News of the World could be reopened and staff prosecuted following legal action by some of its alleged victims . . . [Guardian]

Talks not serious, but Rockies inquire about Rangers all-star Young [Denver Post]

One of the vintner’s shareholders sought to inquire about a wallaby pictured among the vine . . . [Sydney Morning Herald]

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Posted February 15, 2011 in Spelling. Tagged .
  • TruthOrDare

    This article is really inaccurate.  One is NOT preferred over the other at all.  The spelling
    with ‘e’ is British while the spelling with ‘i’ is North American.  As with many other words, it comes down to a difference in spelling between the two.  However, in my case,  I live in the caribbean and we use “enquire” frequently on an unofficial/informal level, but only use “inquire” when speaking about something on an official/formal level. So it more or less depends on your locale’s command of English.*FYI: The ‘american’ version of english words are not to be automatically assumed to be the preferred choice.

    • Grammarist

      Hello. Thank you for your comment. It reminded us that this post did need a little cleaning up. However, we disagree with your argument that “enquire” is preferred outside North America, at least in current news publications.

      Let’s look at a few major British publications. Google News searches for the year of 2011 show these results:

      The Guardian: 4 results for “enquire,” 9 for “inquire.” 22 results for “enquiry,” 340 for “inquiry.”
      The Telegraph: 4 results for “enquire,” 28 for “inquire.” 37 results for “enquiry,” 1,050 for “inquiry.”
      Financial Times (usually extremely British in its spellings): 0 results for “enquire,” 2 for “inquire.” 4 results for “enquiry,” 48 for “inquiry.” 

      Anyone can recreate these results. And just for fun, we did some Google News archive searches to see if the “inquiry” preference is a new thing. For the Guardian, the Telegraph, and the Financial Times, in a search covering January 1, 1950 to November 3, 2011, we fine 51 results for “enquire,” 246 for “inquire,” 465 for “enquiry,” and 17,800 for “inquiry.”

      So this post is not inaccurate. And if you look around our site a little, you’ll see that a large number of our posts are about delineating the differences between British and American English, so we are well aware that one dialectal spelling isn’t automatically preferred over others.

      • American Observer

        It is far more likely that your “statistics” actually reflect the propensity of news publications to report formal investigations. Rather than casual enquiries, such formal proceedings are much more newsworthy.

        A useful statistic would exclude all references to formal inquiries and look at only those references to informal queries.

        • Grammarist

          Are you suggesting that “inquiry” refers to formal investigations and “enquiry” to informal queries? The commenter below suggests the same. That would be interesting and would obviously call for a revision to this post, but we’re not seeing that pattern. Let us know if you can point us toward any good resources on this.

  • Jasperawakens

    In Australia we tend to go the traditional (British) way. Enquire is to ask, Inquire (as in Inquiry) is more formal, like asking a question).

  • JackandJill

    The context in which either of the two words were used is missing from your analysis of the frequency of use (occurrence).

    I will ague that if the contexts were considered, you would notice that there is a pattern, i.e. Inquiry used in the formal/legal context and enquiry more in a more informal setting.

    Let the debate begin.

    • Grammarist

      As we noted above, that would be interesting, but nothing that we’ve seen indicates there is a pattern. If you search publications from outside North America, “inquire” and its derivatives are far more common than “enquire” and its derivatives for all sense of the word in both formal and informal contexts. With the small number of instances of “enquire,” etc. that we find, some are formal/legal and some are not.

      We would love to have our analysis proven incorrect (we’re not emotionally invested either way), but we’re just not seeing that pattern, at least in news publications. We would be grateful to anyone who could point us to a good source of information.

    • Grammarist

      We added a paragraph (the second one) to address these suggestions.