The spelling of chilli / chili / chile

Yesterday I wrote about the troubles I’ve been having with my latest chilli plant. Carl commented on that post:

Your problem is that you offend the plants by continuing to misspell “chili”, which has exactly one “l”. In Spanish, “ll” is pronounced identically to English “y”.

To which I replied:

“Chilli” is the preferred and common spelling in British/Australian English. So it’s even more complicated than that.

This may be surprising to users of American English, but it’s genuinely another example of the weirdness of spelling differences between our dialects. My Australian dictionary lists “chilli” as the preferred spelling. My computer, set to Australian English, accepts “chilli” while marking “chili” as a spelling error. And I went through my pantry and found every relevant product:

Chilli products

As you can see, three out of three in favour of “chilli”. So that hopefully explains what up until now some readers may have assumed was a strange individual quirk of mine.


In another follow-up, recall last Friday I visited Loreto Kirribilli to talk to some of the students there. The school has posted photos of me and some of the students to their accounts on LinkedIn and Instagram.


As for today… it was a bunch of ethics classes from 10am to 2pm, with a brief lunch break in between. I took Scully for a couple of walks. This afternoon I made sourdough bread, and also pizza dough for dinner. And I’m not sure where the rest of the time went. I had another class this evening after dinner… and now time to relax.

New content today:

2 thoughts on “The spelling of chilli / chili / chile”

  1. I didn’t mean to make a big thing out of spelling. I thought I was being funny. I knew perfectly well it was a dialectal difference.

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