this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
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TIL 'gage' is an accepted way of spelling 'gauge'. Not really sure why but I hate it.
If you get involved in the technical trades, it gets weird.
A gauge is something with a dial and a needle pointer and a scale printed on it. Something you would be familiar with is a fuel gauge on a car. That's a gauge. It gives you a reading of how much fuel is in your tank. They are mostly round. But linear ones exist, like a tire pressure gauge.
A gage is a physical thing used to measure or compare other things to. For example, I have set of Pin gages. Which are round, very accurately sized pieces of short rods. They are used for checking hole diameters quickly and easily. A gage you might have used could be a spark plug gage to set the gap of the plug for your car or motor bike. As a toolmaker, I've made a LOT of gages over the years. But I've never made a gauge.
Is it esoteric? Why yes, yes it is. But the different words exist because there are those of us that need to differentiate between the two. Should it matter to you? Probably not. So carry on and as you were.
I am in the technical trades. And the things you call 'gages' I, as most people, call 'gauges' too because, unless you're throwing them to challenge someone to a fight like one would do with a glove, they're different spellings of the same word, with 'gage' being way less common.
Source
Yes, gauge/gage doesn't matter much anymore. But when I went to buy those gage pins and gage blocks, that's how they are named. When people asked me to make go/no go gages, they didn't sent me an email the asking for a go/no gauge. So yes, the words can matter and they STILL get used.
Perhaps for YOU the distinction doesn't matter, but there are times and places it still does. And that's fine.
Look, if you want to spell it 'kerb' when it's on the left side of the street and 'curb' when on the right, you do you mate, I'm not gonna tell you your usage of the English language is wrong. But for most of the world, except a small fraction of Americans, it's 'gauge pins', 'feeler gauges', 'rain gauges'... even in the most specific, technical environments. 'Gage' is so rare that I think I haven't encountered it ever, and if I have I must have thought it was a misspelling, until I read your second post using it and I looked it up in the dictionary from which I learned it's an uncommon spelling of the same word.
I stated that in most cases it does not matter what word you use. But, for some it does matter in specific cases. Gage is a part of my lexicon and I was taught how and when to use the words "gage" and "gauge" by people smarter than both of us put together.
If it's not a part of your lexicon, I fine with that. I'm not the one that appears, (and forgive me if I'm wrong), to take issue here.
Your entire education -- if it was anything like mine -- was dominated by teachers following a curriculum that said that what is prescribed is more important than what is understood, as if at some point we reached an epiphany on the best way to spell things.
Reading Chaucer or Shakespeare is a joy not just because they were highly capable and clever writers, but also because they wrote how they felt. Language is about intelligibility and emotion, not about adherence to arbitrary rules.
That's not to say that there's no value in having maxims for spelling, punctuation, or grammar, just that we let ourselves police these things super zealously for very little benefit.
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I agree with everything you said. But I try and limit my zealous policing to myself, to absolutely no benefit indeed. And I can point my finger at the teachers, specially one, to blame for my orthographical traumas. I hated them and their bullshit, and maybe because of that I love linguistic variety, I usually like alternative spellings and words that can be written or pronounced in different ways. But not this one, for some reason.
Maybe, as a non-native English speaker, I learned that word more from reading than speaking (it's likely I mispronounced it mentally as gorge/gawdg the first time, or few times, I read it even), and it's a word I read and use more often than the average person. It did take a bit more effort for my brain to understand the sentence because of the spelling, so I guess it didn't like that.
We need to make it not accepted.
OP, you gotta learn to use the not horrifying spelling of the word.
My stated goal in life is to make it so that you wake up screaming in terror because you saw my face in a dream.
So it appears my work here is done!