Is it Halloween or Hallowe’en?

👻The schools have just broken up for half term. No doubt you’ve got the kiddos booked in somewhere for spooky activities over the holidays.

So it’s not to early to say this, is it?

🎃 HAPPY HALLOWEEN.

Or should that be Happy Hallowe’en?

🎃 happy halloween?

Or happy hallowe’en?

Or some other variation?

It looks to me like the apostrophe is becoming rarer.

🔎 ‘The Chicago Manual of Style’ goes with Halloween. (CMOS 8.89)

🔎 ‘New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors’ accepts either Hallowe’en or Halloween.

🔎 ‘Collins Dictionary for Writers and Editors’ goes with Halloween, Hallowe’en or Allhallows Eve – the latter, I’m not familiar with at all. I’ve never seen it compounded like that before. Have you?

There are plenty of blog posts about the history of this festival day and the etymology of the word.

I’ll just keep it brief and follow a different angle.

👩‍🏫 If you see Hallowe’en written with the apostrophe in it, that’s because the apostrophe signifies a missing letter. The letter which has been replaced by the apostrophe (to match the pronunciation) is ‘v’. (E’en, as in evening.)

🔠 And, as far as capitals go, yep, use them. It’s the same as when we capitalise other holidays/festivals or holiday greetings like Merry Christmas.

And, to mix things up if your feed is full of carved pumpkins (or turnips if you’re keeping it old skool), to illustrate my Halloween post, here’s a picture of what I did last year with the innards of our pumpkin.

😋 Pumpkin and ginger tea loaf.

Mmmmm.

I reckon I’ll be making this again this year.

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