Chilli, Chili or Chile?

Question

When asking my question here I said I wasn't sure what tags I should use.

I then found my use of the word "chillis" renamed to "chiles" by someone.

To me (British FYI), "chile" looks like is pronounced like the words "pile" or "stile", but not as expected like the words "chilly" or "hilly". I realise this is the spelling of the country Chile, but still at first glance it looks wrong.

So, thought I'd raise the point for discussion.

What Wiktionary Thinks

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chilli (given as "non-US")
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chili (given as "US")
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chile (given as "US Regional")

Current Tags (Updated as someone just created the [chili] tag)

[chilli] - 5
[chili] - 1
[chiles] - 5

Answer 1

I (also UK) am also finding it strange seeing the word chiles. It just looks like a typo. Is it American? I've been online for many many years and thought I was familiar with all the Americanism in cooking: eggplant, cups and jello. Never seen chiles before.

Answer 2

I've done a search-for-it-on-Google-test, results are in millions of matches.

Round 1

chilli  11.9  
chili   35.9  
chile  235.0  

Chile seems to be the runaway winner. However, this does not account for whether these matches are talking about the pepper or a dish (e.g. chil(l?i|e) con carne) and not, for example, the country Chile. So, lets extend the test further.

Round 2

+chilli +(pepper OR peppers)   1.71
+chili +(pepper OR peppers)   15.6
+chile +(pepper OR peppers)    0.583

Again, we seem to have a winner. But this time, we have another problem - the band "Red Hot Chili Peppers" are coming up in many matches and skewing the results again. We need to filter them out as well.

Round 3

+chilli +(pepper OR peppers) -red-hot-chili-peppers  1.84
+chili +(pepper OR peppers) -red-hot-chili-peppers   1.68
+chile +(pepper OR peppers) -red-hot-chili-peppers   4.1

Well. This just makes things worse. Chile, and to a lesser extent Chilli, magically gain more matches. Helpful. I think Google is trying to help too much. Time to be pendantic.

Round 4

0.806  +chilli +(pepper OR peppers) -red-hot-chili-peppers -red-hot-chilli-peppers -red-hot-chile-peppers
1.69   +chili +(pepper OR peppers) -red-hot-chili-peppers -red-hot-chilli-peppers -red-hot-chile-peppers
0.563  +chile +(pepper OR peppers) -red-hot-chili-peppers -red-hot-chilli-peppers -red-hot-chile-peppers

Right. Now I think we're getting somewhere!

Given these tests it looks like chili is in front. Obviously, whether that means it corresponds to the communities needs or not is another question entirely. Plus, it's a shame really, I was hoping chilli would win. ;)

Result so far: Leaning towards Chili

Answer 3

"Chili" and "chilli" are terms used by themselves refer to the dishes. You're going to confuse people if you use them to refer to the peppers.

The rule of thumb for tags is that you never split them. You could add a [chili-peppers] tag if you want, but don't use [chili]+[peppers]. Anyway, [chiles] is clearly the more popular tag referring to the peppers; if that's really confusing to a lot of people (hasn't come up so far) then we'll just add a tag synonym mapping [chili-peppers] and [chilli-peppers] to [chiles].

For now, I'm just going to retag it [chiles].

Answer 4

If confronted with two tags, "CHILES" vs "CHILI" people would find the two as distinguishable; otherwise there are a plethora of ambiguities to pull someone in the other directions. I could be wrong that CHILES is a sufficiently common usage, but to see CHILLI (ie CHILI CON CARNE) i would expect people to know (in spite of the deviant spelling) that's a reference to the dish and not the fruit. It could also be done as CHILI-PEPPER vs CHILI

Answer 5

Using the proper terminology for a tag is best IMO. If the British are more comfortable with chilli they can use that in the title/body. Synonyms will take care of the tag.

BTW, chilli fails spell check, at least in America.

Answer 6

Worthy of tags:

• Chilies are the fruit of the capsicum family.
• Chili is a dish made with chilies and ground meat.

Not worthy of tags, most likely typos:

• Chile is country in South America.
• Chilli is a member of singing group TLC
• Chiles is a volcano in Ecuador

update :

I admit, I hadn't seen the 'chilli' and 'chiles' in use before as an intended spelling, however, the issue is more than just spelling variants -- there's the issue of homonyms when you're selecting tags; "chile" is a bad choice as a preferred term because someone might assume it references chilean cooking. (turkey's a problem term for the same reason). You should select terms that are unambiguous, so there isn't the assumption that they're typos. From the Getty Introduction to Controlled Vocabularies (section 7.4.1, "Establishing Terms") :

Criteria in choosing terms should include the elimination of ambiguity and the control of synonyms. Vocabularies should eliminate the ambiguity that occurs in natural language, including the ambiguity surrounding homographs. Homographs are words or terms that share the same spelling. A homograph may be a homonym or a polyseme. Homonyms have different meanings and unrelated origins, whereas polysemes are usually considered to have multiple meanings.

When we have homographs, attempts to do word counts are useless -- you have to go through and audit the findings to verify how the term was used, and if it had the concept you were looking for.

In my quick survey of occurances 'chilli', besides the issue of it being polysemous (having more than one meaning -- both the dish and the fruit), I found another issue -- when used for the fruit, it tends to be part of a compound term -- 'chilli pepper'. We should be careful about using fragments as tags.