Template talk:obsolete spelling of

How far back?
I'm assuming we should only go back to circa AD 1470 as per Obsolete and archaic terms. So if a source spells a word differently, but the source is from before 1470, then it shouldn't be used to justify the obsolete spelling (or the inclusion of the word at all under English, if not spelled the same way in Modern English -- although it could go in under Middle English or even Old English if really old).

Thus Chaucer is out and Shakespeare is in when it comes to finding obsolete spellings of words. Does this sound OK to everyone? Facts707 12:42, 22 January 2010 (UTC)


 * That seems accurate to me. FWIW, the classification of archaic vs. obsolete in that page does not match my understanding. (I've been using: dated, used within century; obsolete, used within centuries; archaic, not used since the 16th or 17th century.) -- Visviva 15:52, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Language section link
I can't figure out how to fix this, but (for example) &#123;{obsolete spelling of|lang=es|a}&#125; (at á correctly categorizes the word into Category:Spanish obsolete spellings, but it points to a rather than a. What do we fix so that the lang=es parameter finds the correct section of the target word as well as finding the correct category? —Angr 22:50, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry, no answer here, but I wonder the same. Longtrend 11:00, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

Doesn't seem to support words which have more than one correct, common, modern, standard spelling
Some words in some languages have more than one correct, common, modern, standard spelling.

As far as I can see this template currently forces the editor to arbitrarily choose one of those as the one true correct spelling. We should offer users links to all correct spellings so they can make their own choice about which they might want to use, or which multiple forms they might want to find out about. &mdash; hippietrail (talk) 00:50, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Examples:

Lao is the obsolete form of a word that is now spelled both  and. &mdash; hippietrail (talk) 00:54, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Trailing period (full stop)
Is there a reason why this template doesn't automatically include a trailing period (full stop) like the other spelling templates (eg. Template:archaic spelling of)? -Mike (talk) 21:29, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
 * The templates are known to be highly inconsistent in dotting and capitalizing. There was a discussion to harmonize,, , which has been forgotten during the harmonization of other things. Fay Freak (talk) 22:03, 25 October 2019 (UTC)