'Stationery' Versus 'Stationary'

One difficult set of words is “stationery” and “stationary.” They are pronounced the same, but mean different things. They’re homophones.

You can trace both words back to the Latin word “stationarius,” which meant “without motion,” and in Latin, it seems to have been used to describe a military station.

‘Stationary’

It’s easy to see how a Latin word that meant “motionless” gives us the English word “stationary,” which essentially means the same thing: “not moving, fixed in one place, still” and so on. 

Almost every big gym has a row of stationary bikes.

You can remember the spelling of this word by thinking that when you are stationary, you are often standing. Since “standing” is also spelled with an A, the association can remind you to put the second A in “stationary.”

‘Stationery’

The story of how we get “stationery” is a little more interesting. 

In the Middle Ages, many villages and towns got goods from traveling peddlers, but as anyone who’s packed too many books on vacation knows, books and other paper products are heavy, so booksellers and people who sold other paper products usually sold them from a storefront—a stationary location, as in a location that didn’t move. That kind of stationary is spelled with an A, but then these sellers became known as “stationers.” Then by association, the products they sold, the stationers’ wares, became known as “stationery” with an E after the name of the people who ran the shops—the stationers.

And as a delightful aside, the Oxford English Dictionary describes a livery company of the City of London formed in the 1400s called the Worshipful Company of Stationers, which was essentially a guild of stationers, and it still exists today, but it’s now called The Stationers’ Company.

The Oxford English Dictionary also says that Stationer (at the time spelled Staciner) was a surname in the late 1200s. If your last name is Stationer, it probably means one of your ancestors was a bookseller, printer, or bookbinder.

“Stationery,” with an E, is paper, usually paper that you use for writing letters or notes, and  “stationery” is spelled with an E because it goes back to the stationers, the people who ran the shops. But if that doesn’t help you...

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