BattleTechWiki talk:Spacecraft Portal

Battlecruiser vs. Battle Cruiser[edit]

I did a cursory online dictionary search and the result was that "battle cruiser" should always be spelled as two words. Now I'm not a native speaker of English and if BrokenMnemonic says it's always "battlecruiser" then I'm inclined to believe him. It's weird though. Perhaps "battle cruiser" is American spelling? If so, we should adopt it as this wiki seeks to follow US spelling. Frabby (talk) 06:55, 6 August 2015 (PDT)

Wikipedia uses battlecruiser consistently, and the Oxford online dictionaries use battlecruiser as both the British English and US English form. I've also only ever seen the term battlecruiser in military texts, not battle-cruiser or battle cruiser, and I've just looked at the Concise Oxford Dictionary on my desk and that also only uses battlecruiser. It also appears that the Imperial War Museum uses battlecruiser as the correct spelling. BrokenMnemonic (talk) 07:15, 6 August 2015 (PDT)
That's what I get for relying on a single translation page which curiously doesn't recognize or acknowledge "battlecruiser". With the overwhelming proof you present I'll just go back and revert everything to battlecruiser. Thanks for clearing this up! Frabby (talk) 07:27, 6 August 2015 (PDT)
If it helps, "battle cruiser" was the original term, according to an Admiralty Weekly Order from around 1911-12 (before that they'd been called various things, including battlecruisers and armour cruisers) but the term steadily dropped out of use in favour of battlecruiser. Ironically, a year after the order declared that the correct term was "battle cruiser", another senior admiral was using the term "battle-cruiser". I don't think there's a clear switch to battlecruiser being the accepted term - I think it became the covention through use more than formal definition, and I suspect - but I could be wrong - that it was probably in the 1920s-30s. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 stopped countries from really building the bigger battlecruisers, although some carried on in service, but only in the British and Japanese navies - the other nation battlecruisers got rebuilt later as actual battleships or scrapped. I suspect the battlecruiser name convention carries on from whatever the British or Japanese adopted as the regular convention during this period. BrokenMnemonic (talk) 09:29, 6 August 2015 (PDT)