Readers who are paying close attention will notice that the USTA Friend at Court and ITF references that are cited use the spelling “racket” while I have elected to use the spelling “racquet.” In fact I had to add the word to my WordPress dictionary to avoid the red squiggly lines under the word that offend my sensibilities.
If you look up “racquet” in the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, the site obstinately provides the “racket” spelling noting that racquet is a variant of the word. To me “racket” is a lot of annoying noise or a scam. “Racket” just looks wrong to me in the tennis context. I am annoyed at the ITF spelling.
I don’t want to admit that I am a pretentious tennis snob, but comes down to using “racquet” or the “racket” spelling, then there is really no contest. Sometimes you just have to be who you are.
Ultimately I defer to the authoritative sources, by which of course I mean Tennis Express, Tennis Warehouse, and Midwest Sports. All three of the major online retailers sell racquets rather not rackets.
As I write this, the Australian Open is currently being played. As tennis players are aware the Australian Open is one of the Majors and marks the time of year when tennis broadcasts move from the Tennis Channel to ESPN prompting that network to temporarily cover tennis before reverting to a state that suggests that the sport does not exist until the eve of the next Major.
I did some googling for raw counts on the use of racquet and racket in articles on ESPN and the Tennis Channel. ESPN turns up 29,800 hits for racquet and 21,000 hits for racket. The Tennis Channel turns up 2 hits for racquet and 3 hits for racquet. As it turns out, the Tennis Channel does not produce a lot of what would be considered to be traditional print media like content, at least not at the tennischannel.com url.
As I move into examination of the rules of tennis regarding the racquet I will continue to use my preferred spelling when it is my writing but will retain the misspelling racket when quoting ITF Rules, the USTA Friend at Court and other sources.
- Merriam-Webster online dictionary, www.m-w.com
