I’ve always wondered whether theses words mean the same thing or whether anybody would argue that they don’t somehow. Dictionary.com thinks they mean the same thing. I always go with “enquire”, but for no particular reason I can think of now.
Merriam-Webster’s also cites “enquire” as a “variant of inquire”.
WAG, it seems like one of those words where enough misspellings led to a tolerated “alternate” spelling. Seeing as they are phonetically pretty much equivalent, why not?
There’s no difference in meaning.
In England enquire is the common form and inquire is used for official things like Government Inquiry Boards, etc.
None at all.
Can I inquire how you know this? 
“The Government has announced that there will be an Enquiry into the Equitable Life debacle headed by Lord Penrose.”
http://www.cookham.com/community/equitable/govenquiry.htm
"Sir Paul Beresford MP is a member of the Government’s Select Committee which is conducting an enquiry into Local Government Revenue. "
“The Parliamentary Ombudsman has launched an enquiry into whether the government misled workers over the security of their occupational pension schemes; Ann Abraham will investigate the actions of four government departments”
http://www.financesearch.co.uk/news/0/768/
On this link, they use both spellings!
http://www.sheffcol.ac.uk/links/Others/Government/Stephen_Lawrence_enquiry/
“Inquire” bugs the hell out of me, much the same as the word “buses.” It’s “enquire” and “busses” and I’ll throw in “ensure” instead of “insure” unless you’re talking about “insurance.”
Granted, that’s according to me and none of those disreputable dictionary makers will back me up.
That to me, is the difference in meaning: [
I’ve wondered about the difference myself, and I finally decided that “enquire” was more of a British thing and “inquire” was more of a US thing.
Balthisar, “insure” and “ensure” only bug me when they’re used incorrectly. Which is, like, every time. Office memoes and such that ask people to do somthing to “insure” that something else happens, is wrong wrong wrong. Not that I get that worked up over little things like this.
This post checked via preview. Any and all mispellings or grammatical errors are due to the Bush administration’s lies and the fact that VP Cheney is scary and amazingly effective at his job
Busses = kisses (possible from Persian bûsa ‘kiss’)
Buses = transit vehicles
I don’t see any good reason to avoid clarity, unless someone has a sexual fetish involving public transportation (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
The National Enquirer was a very successful tabloid and The National Inquirer was a short-lived poor imitation.
If you Google The National Inquirer, however, you’ll get tens of thousands of hits and they mostly seem to be misspellings of The National Enquirer. This leads me to posit that inquire is the more natural form in American English.
Perfectly good alternate spelling. And a better spelling, IMHO.
Not to mention assure. It really bugs me that there are insurance companies called ___ Assurance, for example American Family Life Assurance Co. I once asked a life-insurance phone salesman exactly what his company was going to do to ASsure my life. It went right over his head. Oh well …
Of course the Merriam Webster On-Line Dictionary not oly lists ensure, insure and assure as synonyms, it says “INSURE sometimes stresses the taking of necessary measures beforehand.” which I always took to be the distinctin of ensure. Though it does also list its first definition as “to provide or obtain insurance”
One of my pet peeves is the word “Offence” as compaired to the correct (IMHO) “Offense”. The former sounds like someone is talking about a fence.
I take it you didn’t participate in the Spanish Enquisition, then?
Balthisar, I was in grade school in the 1960s when the spelling “busses” was still current for buses, and I remember the many controversies in the early 1970s when court-ordered school busing for racial integration was a hot topic, that opened a side debate on whether there’s any use in continuing to double the s, because that made a homonym for no good reason. The spelling rule to preserve shortness of the root vowel when a lengthening suffix is added, to cancel the lengthening was a rule that was useful as a guide to pronunciation most of the time. But when this spelling rule clashes with clarity, introducing needless ambiguity, as a longtime grammarian I would totally go with clarity. For similar reasons Christ asked “Was the Sabbath made for people, or were people made for the Sabbath”? It was just supposed to be a convenience, not an ironclad rule.
This may be my first time Gaudereizing myself. Here I’m spouting grammar and what have I done but stick the question mark outside the quotation marks.:smack: