Should "glamourous" be considered incorrect?

The Wiktionary entry for glamourous, for what it's worth, claims that it is "a common British spelling", but many native English speakers dismiss it as incorrect. Some, though, draw a distinction between "glamorous" and "glamourous", saying that the latter is a valid, British spelling.

What's your take on this?

Solution 1:

Edit in response to comments: as has been pointed out in the other answers, the spelling glamourous is included in the Oxford English Dictionary, which is why my answer doesn't so much as address the question of whether it is considered wrong by everyone, but rather tries to quantify its popularity — or, as it turns out, the lack thereof.

Here are the usage stats from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA):

              BNC   COCA
glamorous     562   2375
glamourous      9     22

So the spelling without the u is preferred on both sides of the pond, though the preference is marginally stronger in the US (99.1%) than in the UK (98.4%).

Here's a breakdown by publication type:

                  ou/o  ratio (%)

MAGAZINE  (BNC)   4/114   3.5
NEWSPAPER (BNC)   3/109   2.8
MISC      (BNC)   2/113   1.8
FICTION   (COCA)  5/392   1.3
MAGAZINE  (COCA)  8/811   1.0
NEWSPAPER (COCA)  5/535   0.9
ACADEMIC  (COCA)  1/120   0.8
FICTION   (BNC)   0/142   0     
NON-ACAD  (BNC)   0/50    0     
ACADEMIC  (BNC)   0/17    0     

This means that relatively speaking, you are most likely to encounter the spelling glamourous in British magazines and newspapers, but seeing the absolute numbers you might consider yourself lucky if you encounter it at all.

So, both spellings are used — and in print, not just in YouTube comments —, but if you want to be on the safe side, glamorous is the way to go.

Solution 2:

Not being British, I hesitate to comment. However, the OED(1973) entry for "glamorous" begins with the words "also glamourous". This means it's valid, although I believe that most speakers of British English would not use it.

Solution 3:

It certainly is not a common British spelling, and most people would probably shy away from using -ou- twice in a word. I would.

The ngrams for British English and American English look very similar.

Solution 4:

"Glamourous" is not an invalid British English spelling but it is not a common British English spelling.

The stem of the word, when used on its own (without a suffix), can be spelt "glamor" or "glamour", so called US English spelling and British English spelling respectively. However, when used with the "-ous" suffix in British English the stem is overwhelmingly spelt in the US English way, to form the British English word "glamorous".

To give you a measure of what "not a common British English spelling" means, a search of the British National Corpus for "glamorous" returns 562 occurrences, while a search for "glamourous" returns 9 occurrences.

I would say that the Wikipedia entry is confused between the common British English spellings of the words "glamour" and "glamorous": "glamour" is a common British English spelling, "glamourous" is not a common British English spelling.

The word "glamourous" does appear in the Oxford English Dictionary (2007). It does not have a separate entry but appears as a listed adjective to the verb "glamourise".