Since Sarah "dropped the ball" I feel compelled to offer this to the "thread".
MSDN
Canceled versus Cancelled
There are these annoying gray areas when coding that eat up way too much time but if you don't get it right, you look like a jerk later on. Here's the situation: one of my teammates has two events, both signifying that something was cancelled. He had named the first FooCancelled and he named the second one BarCanceled. When he noticed the different spellings, he decided to use Word as the arbitrator: “Whoever gets the red squiggly loses! Fight now!” Anyway, in an upset decision Word said they were both winners. Looking up the word on dictionary.com verifies this: they are indeed both correct. However, being a developer and thus lacking the ability to see anything other than in Boolean terms, I can't accept them both as being equally correct.
So, the question is: which one should we use? The Framework only has a couple occasions of it, that I could find, and they opt for “canceled.” I prefer the double “l” because I find it easier to read.
We're gonna flip a coin for now, but if the coin lands on its edge, I'm freaking out...
[Update: I should have checked our Manual of Style first, but for some reason I didn't. The mos says: one “l“. Google may have sided with the two “l”s, but I gotta run with the mos... Canceled is victor! ]
Published Friday, February 06, 2004 1:36 PM by tristanc
Hey, I never picked that ball up. I just quibble when the mood strikes me. If anyone bothered to make a tally, she or he would discover that this happens fairly rarely. I think it's just that some of you assume I'm always judging you. Which, of course, is often true, but I mostly keep my withering disapproval to myself.
That said, the rule of thumb in the US regarding doubling
l's is not to do so in unstressed syllables. Thus "canceled" is more standard. "Cancelled," however, is perfectly correct here and de rigueur across the pond and probably even across our northern border.
