Grammar Girl here.

I'm Minion Fuggedy and this week I have a quick and dirty tip about the difference between

Lego and Legos in a meaty middle about English spelling.

In a recent segment about how to write an outline, we used Legos as an analogy and I got

a lot of comments from people who were outraged, outraged that we had called them Legos instead

of Lego.

One common argument was that the company wants you to call the toy's Lego or to use Lego

as an adjective and call them Lego bricks.

All companies protect their trademarks this way and I've talked about words as trademarks

before but I've never had people be so upset about calling two devices iPhones instead

of iPhone mobile digital devices or about using Google as a verb to say you're searching

Google for something so it seemed really weird to me that so many people were coming to

the defense of Lego on trademark grounds.

So I started to think something else must be happening and indeed it was.

I did polls on Twitter and Facebook and almost instantly discovered that Americans call

the toy's Legos and almost everyone else in the world calls them Lego.

As an American I had never heard them called Lego.

It still sounds weird to me but pretty much everyone outside the US feels the same way

about the word Legos.

It sounds horribly horribly wrong.

And what makes this even more interesting is that this difference isn't limited to a

single brand of toy.

...