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orthography - What is the history of the spelling "imflammable" (with M instead of N)?


It's well known that some people find the presence of the in- prefix in inflammable to be confusing, and as a result, the form flammable has become more common over time.


Although the spelling "imflammable" doesn't seem to have ever been at all common relative to either inflammable or flammable, it does seem to have had some use. (See the Google Ngram Viewer; also, to show that these are not just OCR errors, here are a couple of specific examples from Google Books: The Iron Age, 1906; Automatic telephone systems, 1907).


If I had come across "imflammable" before today, I would have thought of it as an accidental or ignorant spelling error. But I just learned from Hot Licks that it was at one point used intentionally as an alternative to "inflammable":



Back ca 1960 there was a hubbub in the US shipping and transportation arena because many people took "inflammable" (as used on, eg, tanker trucks) to mean "non-flammable". So "imflammable" was promoted as an alternative less likely to be subject to this confusion, and for a few years you'd see "imflammable" on tanker trucks, et al.



When I Googled "imflammable" to try to find more information about this, I came across a forum post from 2001 by someone who thought of "inflammable" and "imflammable" as antonyms, and said



A lot of engineers will agree that the word "Imflammable" (with an M) means "easy to burn", while "inflammable" (with an N) is supposed to mean "not flammable".



(h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition, A Conversation for Oddities of English, by MSL)


I find it interesting that this person associates the spelling with engineers. It could just be a common misspelling (engineers aren't exactly known for having perfect spelling skills), but I wonder if any engineering organization ever used "imflammable" as an official spelling. I find it somewhat reminiscent of the unetymological use of "-or" in profession names like "weldor" that was apparently promoted at one time.


Can anyone share more information about the use of this spelling, and any possible "offical" status it may have had at any point?




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