Whisky & Whiskey

Why are some whiskies spelled with an ‘e’ and some not?

‘Whisky’ and ‘whiskey’ both derive from the Gaelic uisge beatha, ‘water of life’, sometimes rendered as usquebaugh, abbreviated to uiskie (c.1618), then whiskie (1715) in a telling quote: “Whiskie shall put our brains in a rage”. The modern spelling, whisky, first appeared in 1745 and whiskey in 1752.

Gaelic is primarily a spoken language and the spelling of many words is variable. In our family bible my great-great grandfather, a Gaelic speaker, spells the surnames of his eleven children four different ways – ‘MacLean’, ‘McLean’, ‘M’Lean’, ‘Maclean’. In other words, ‘whisky’ and ‘whiskey’ are synonymous, although modern usage distinguishes Irish and American whiskey with an ‘e’ from Scotch and the rest of the world whiskies without an ‘e’.

The Scotch Whisky Association helpfully notes that “The most that can be said with any certainty is that it is convention that grew up gradually as spellings, which were for a long time very variable, became standardised”. As late as 1908/9 the Royal Commission on Whiskey and Other Potable Spirits, which produced the first legal definition of Scotch, spells it with an ‘e’ throughout.

In The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom (1887) Alfred Barnard applies ‘whisky’ in the Scots manner to Irish whiskey, and according to Gavin Smith in his A to Z of Whisky (1993) the ‘e’ was first adopted by the Dublin distillers to distinguish their products from what they perceived to be inferior provincial spirits, like Paddy, made in Cork, which continued to use the Scotch spelling until it merged with the Dublin distillers to form Irish Distillers in 1966.

Even in the United States there are distillers who eschew the customary spelling, notably Maker’s Mark (Kentucky) and George Dickel (Tennessee), both of which brand without the ‘e’.