TY - JOUR T1 - ‘Dilatation’ and ‘dilation’: trends in use on both sides of the Atlantic JF - British Journal of Ophthalmology JO - Br J Ophthalmol SP - 845 LP - 846 DO - 10.1136/bjophthalmol-2014-304986 VL - 98 IS - 6 AU - Omar A Mahroo AU - Zaid Shalchi AU - Christopher J Hammond Y1 - 2014/06/01 UR - http://bjo.bmj.com/content/98/6/845.abstract N2 - The synonyms ‘dilation’ and ‘dilatation’ are used frequently in ophthalmology and other disciplines. The first recorded examples of early forms of the two words in English date from the end of the 14th century.1 ‘Dilatation’ is etymologically more sound,2 preserving the Latin dilatatio (corresponding to the verb dilatare, with the stem dilatat, from which the word ‘dilate’ also derives), but ‘dilation’ could be justified by arguing that –tion is a live suffix in English and so can be added to the verb ‘dilate’ to give ‘dilation’.2We examined trends in usage in medical and wider English-language literature using three open access digital databases: the PubMed database (http://www.pubmed.com) provides data for citations per year; the Google Scholar search engine (http://scholar.google.com) searches more widely, including non-medical literature and patents; and the Google Books Ngram Viewer (http://books.google.com/ngrams) searches corpora of several million digitised books, taken from over 40 university libraries, stretching … ER -