A Field Guide to the Word Nor'easter and Its Maine Critics
Sailors clipped compass points, New Englanders drop their r's, and one Maine captain mailed postcards to stamp out the apostrophe. Here is who is right.
For years, a retired Navy captain in Brunswick, Maine, kept a stack of blue postcards ready for one purpose: complaining to anyone in the media who wrote or said nor'easter. I found Edgar Comee while checking where these storms got their name, and he turned a spelling question into the most cheerful thing I read all week.
His grudge rests on a real question, one that surfaces every time a big coastal storm like the late-September 2026 system parks off the East Coast. Is the proper word nor'easter or northeaster? Here is how both spellings got here, and why each can be defended by serious people.
What sailors actually clipped
Seafarers really did shorten compass points. Wikipedia's entry on the storm, drawing on the Oxford English Dictionary, traces contractions such as nor'east and nor-nor-west to the late 16th century, including John Davis's 1594 navigation manual, The Seaman's Secrets. Learning to box the compass, the old drill of naming all thirty-two points in order, meant reciting those clipped points aloud.
The storm word is younger. By the same account, the OED's first printed nor'easter turns up in 1837, in a translation of Aristophanes. A Greek comedy is a strange cradle for a New England weather word. Language Log's Mark Liberman noted in 2010 that 19th-century English writers used the form mostly in eye-dialect, meaning spellings meant to look like how a character talks.
How the coast says it
Comee's side argued that nobody on the actual coast talks that way. A Cape Cod correspondent quoted on Language Log gave the local pronunciation as nawtheastah or nahtheastah. The r goes missing, but the th stays put. The apostrophe spelling does the reverse, keeping the r and cutting the th, which is roughly how a Hollywood Mainer talks. If you want to sound like the coast rather than a headline, drop the r and keep the th.
That last jab belongs to the novelist Cathie Pelletier. Down East magazine reported in February 2023 that she left the apostrophe off her book Northeaster, about the blizzard of 1952, and New England Today adds that she never heard anyone in northern Maine say nor'easter growing up.
The captain and his committee
Comee (1917 to 2005) commanded a Navy ship in World War II and later covered the waterfront for the Portland Press Herald, according to New England Today. He founded the Ad Hoc Committee for Stamping Out Nor'easter, which by that magazine's own headline was one man's crusade. He was no armchair pedant, either: he had spent a career around ships and working harbors before he took up his pen against a single punctuation mark. His cards called the word an affectation of non-sailors who wish to appear salty. His cards closed with a flourish worthy of an 18th-century admiralty clerk.
Your most humble petitioner, Edgar Comee, Chairman, Ad Hoc Committee for Stamping Out Nor'easter
The New Yorker gave his committee a lighthearted write-up in September 2005, Down East notes, not long before he died.
Which spelling won
The apostrophe, by a landslide. Language Log cites the Boston Globe language columnist Jan Freeman, who found that journalists used nor'easter in only one of five mentions of these storms from 1975 to 1980, and in more than 80 percent in the year before her column appeared. Even the National Weather Service's own safety page spells it Nor'easter, capital N and all.
| Spelling | Case for it | Case against it |
|---|---|---|
| northeaster | Older, plain compass word; matches how the coast pronounces it | Rarely seen in headlines now |
| nor'easter | What forecasters, newspapers and searchers overwhelmingly use | Critics call it a landlubber's idea of sailor talk |
My verdict: both are correct, and northeaster has the older and saltier claim. We use nor'easter on this site because it is the word most readers search for, which surely would have earned a blue postcard. Honestly, I would have framed it.
Sources
Every factual claim above traces to one of these. Links open in a new tab.
