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Protester vs Protestor
Which one is correct?
If you have read much of the coverage concerning recent events in the United States, especially regarding the protest movements such as Black Lives Matter and other protests about various topics of concern throughout the world, maybe you’ve noticed that no one seems to be able to agree on the proper way to spell the word protester. One article will spell it protester, and the next will spell it protestor. Heck, some writers have even spelled it both ways in the course of a single article. I’ve caught myself trying to do this in fact, and I noticed that the grammar correction function of Word does not seem to mind either spelling. So, I decided to investigate this for my own sanity.
The root of the word protester/protestor is obviously protest, so you would think, but protest is actually a shortening of the Latin original prōtestārī, which meant to declare publicly. Protest itself was a French word, protêt, originating in usage around 1350–1400. This is according the the etymology listed with protester on dictionary.com. You might notice, that listed among the variations of the word, when it shows protester, it lists protestor next to it as an alternate. This is not helpful to my goal.
However, when one searches for the word protestor on any dictionary site, the default return for this is protester as a result. This…
