Putting the 'ugh' in borough
Spellings of the ∈boroughs∈ in the area can vary. The two signs pictured are along the same stretch of Route 9, but sport competing spellings for the same town.Towns, businesses cope with scattershot spelling
By Matthew L. Brown
Up until recently at the Worcester Business Journal, Westborough had always appeared in its pages with the spelling Westboro.
Same with Marlboro, Southboro and Northboro. That's just the way it's been. Going with "boro" over "borough" was a conscious decision somewhere along the way, becoming part of what the paper calls its "style."
Businesses in those towns are free to choose as well, and even though the vast majority use borough, boro shows up in some pretty official places, like on road signs that direct drivers toward "Marlboro."
Puzzling? Maybe. Interesting? Sure. Wrong? Well, kind of.
Spell check
According to folks in Westborough, Southborough and Northborough, the borough spelling is correct, the "legal spelling," and boro was simply a passing fad.
Businesses in the boroughs say they never gave much thought to how to spell borough. They just defaulted to the spelling used by the towns themselves.
"It should be o-u-g-h," said Dawn Michanowicz, Southborough’s assistant town clerk. "For some years, they shortened it to o-r-o, but I’ve seen some of the old documents" in which the town’s name is spelled Southborough, she said.
Jason Fredette, a spokesman for American Superconductor Corp. in Westborough, said having two possible spellings for the name of the town in which the company has its corporate headquarters was never confusing, and has never been a problem for the company.
"O-r-o is almost slang for the town," Fredette said. "G-h is the formal town name. We moved our headquarters here about 10 years ago, and I think that’s how we’ve used it consistently throughout. The formal one is probably the right way to go for a business."
The Westborough law firm Sager & Schaffer does business incorporations, and attorney Steven Sager said, "there’s one official way to spell the town name, and that’s with the u-g-h. For all the boroughs, it’s u-g-h."
"For addresses and official correspondence, we always use the official address, not a nickname or abbreviation," Sager said.
But if a business wants to call itself "Westboro Shoe," for example, "that's just the business name, and they can have any spelling they want."
Businesses just have to be careful "to distinguish between the trade name of the business and the legal name of the town."
An old problem
The modern citizens and businesses of Massachusetts are not the first to have options for how to spell borough, and probably won’t be the ones to decide once and for all which is correct.
Borough is on Old English word based on the early words burg and burth. By the time the language developed into what is known as Middle English, "a huge variety of spellings for borough existed," according to the Oxford Essential Dictionary of Word Histories.
Its original meaning was "a fortress," or "a citadel." It evolved to mean "a fortified town," and eventually, "town" or "district," according to the dictionary.
Borough has relatives like burgh, burg (Fitchburg, Lunenburg, anyone?), burgher (Dutch for the inhabitant of a borough), burgus and Bourgeois, throughout the languages of Europe.
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