When you have something that holds your entire argument (or carriage) together, spelling it wrong certainly doesn’t help your cause. How do you spell “lynchpin”/”linchpin”?
This one’s tricky. Just because you’ve seen it written one way doesn’t mean that all uses are standard, and much like “acknowledgements” and “acknowledgments,” both “lynchpin” and “linchpin” can be commonly found online. But the correct answer is…
Wait for it…
“Linchpin.”
And here’s the wild and wonderful part: nearly everyone around the world agrees. There’s no British vs. American English divide here, thank Ben Franklin and Noah Webster very much.
In fact, “linchpin” is an incredibly old word, harkening back to the center of a wagon wheel that attached to a cart or carriage. In Old English, this central attachment was called a “lynis.” As Old English evolved into Middle English—think roughly the 13th century—this attachment became known as a “lynis-pin” or “linspin,” which evolved into the “linchpin” we know today.
Of course, nowadays, we’re not commonly talking about components of a wagon wheel.
A “linchpin” today is an essential component of the whole, something without which everything else will fall apart. A court case, a chemical compound, a maniacal scheme … these can all have linchpins.
“Lynchpins,” on the other hand, do come up fairly frequently, so let’s spend a moment with that. This less common spelling is included in many dictionaries, but it’s almost always recognized as a variant of the standard spelling. To be clear, there does not seem to be a connection between the verb “to lynch” and this alternate spelling, other than the fact that people might be familiar with one and incorrectly assume the spelling of the other.
So how are you holding together, folks? Here’s hoping your grammar and word choice aren’t something that are making you feel like you’re falling apart. But if you’re looking for that linchpin, at least you’ll know how to spell it.
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