Do You Send in the

Cavalry or the Calvary?

How to remember the diff erence
between these commonly confused
words
When you find yourself facing daunting circumstances and seemingly
innumerable foes, do you figuratively sound the trumpets and call in
the cavalry ? Or do you decide to call in the calvary ? If it is the former, you
are on the right track, and we hope that help will soon come to your aid. If
you opt for the latter, you have just made a request, which we hope will go
unfulfilled, for someone to send you an experience of intense suffering.

You're in trouble! Think quick: do you call in the cavalry, or the

calvary?
These two words are often confused, enough so that we record the
pronunciation for calvary (kal-v-r) as a variant on the headword
for cavalry. Why would we do such a thing? Because a large number of
people pronounce cavalry as calvary, even if they have no trouble
distinguishing between the two words in writing. And our pronunciation
for this variant does note that it is stigmatized ; we place a little
before pronunciation variants which many regard as unacceptable.
(This sign, by the way, is called an obelus , in case you didnt want to
keep referring to it by its better-known name, which is "that division
signyou know, the one with a line and a dot above it and below it
you know the one Im talking about? Wait, do you have a piece of paper
and a pen? Ill show you what I mean.")
Although they begin and end with the same groups of
letters, cavalry and calvary are not related in either origin or
meaning. Cavalry (an army component mounted on horseback)

comes from the Italian word cavalleria, which may mean either
cavalry or chivalry . Two earlier meanings of cavalry in English, now
both obsolete, were horsemanship and knighthood.
Calvary was first used in our language over a thousand years ago, as
the name of the place outside ancient Jerusalem where Jesus was
crucified. This name comes to English from the Latin word for skull
(calvria). In the 18th century calvary began to be used with the
meaning of an open-air representation of the crucifixion of Jesus, and
then later took on the sense of experience of intense suffering. When
referring to the specific place the word is capitalized; when
using calvary to indicate a representation or an instance of suffering it
is written in lowercase.
If you have trouble distinguishing between these two words, it may
help to remember that the word dealing with horsemen has val in the
middle of it. If you associate this word with the long-running comic
strip Prince Valiant (who occasionally appears on horseback), you will
make the correct choice.