StationEry versus StationAry • 10/20/05
The word “stationery” is a pretty commonly mispelled word and chances are you’ve found yourself wondering which one is which at one time or another. Possibly while writing on actual STATIONERY. =)
The word stationery is the one that has to do with paper, basically something that you write on. The other word, stationary, is often not a physical thing but an adjective that means standing still or staying in one place.
As for a history of the two words and the confusion surrounding them, from worldwidewords.org we learn:
The words come from the same source, the Latin stationarius, for a person who was based at a military station. In medieval times a stationarius was a trader who had a fixed station—a shop—rather than travelling from fair to fair, like a pedlar. These were usually booksellers … It became stationer in English, a form that’s recorded from the fourteenth century.
Such traders dealt in everything to do with books, not merely selling them but copying and binding them and selling related materials such as paper, pens and ink … By the seventeenth century the term bookseller had come in for the trader in finished books, leaving stationer for the seller of writing materials.
It’s pretty interesting that both words actually come from the same root source. For the purposes of The Paper Arts site, you only need to know the word “stationery”. But how do you remember which one is which? One way is to use a mnemonic device to help remember the “a” and the “e”. In this case, a good one is to associate “stationery” with an “envelope” which starts with an “e”.
