Fashion Terms — the Apparel Search fashion terminology directory
This page answers the visitor who arrived certain that “apparal” is the proper spelling. It is not: using the letter “a” three times gives a word that does not exist in the dictionary, while apparel — A-P-P-A-R-E-L — is the word the clothing industry runs on. The disagreement is friendly, but on the spelling itself there is no room for debate.
I think that the proper spelling is Apparal.
Did you really think that apparal with the use of the letter "A" three times is correct?
If you do, I am sorry to tell you but you are a bit insane (get yourself a straightjacket).
We disagree with the way you spell apparal, because we all know that it should clearly be spelled APPAREL.
Most people who write “apparal” are not guessing at random — they are writing what they hear. Spoken quickly, apparel stresses the second syllable and reduces the final syllable to a soft “uhl”, and a writer reaching for that sound often lands on “al”, matching the start of the word. Confidence makes it worse: a spelling used for years, in signatures, folder names and file names, starts to look right simply because it is familiar. Search data shows the error is widespread enough that this directory keeps a small cluster of pages devoted to correcting it.
The reliable cure is to break the word into its spoken parts once and remember the pattern: ap-par-el. The middle is “par”, like a golf score, and the end is “el”, the letter L's own name. Written that way — A-P-P-A-R-E-L — the word has only two A's, one pair of P's, and an E doing quiet work near the end. Anyone who has been spelling it with three A's has good company, but the dictionary, the industry, and this page all agree on the correction.
No. As this page puts it, did you really think that apparal, with the use of the letter “a” three times, is correct? The correct spelling is APPAREL.
Twice — the first two letters are “ap”, and the “a” appears once more in the middle: A-P-P-A-R-E-L. The letter before the final L is E, not A.
In any dictionary — the advice given on the companion page to anyone who thinks apparal is correct is to look into purchasing (or opening) one, and to let a spellchecker review fashion writing before it is published.