principle vs principal

[Vikram C.]

I have been seeing a lot of posts where the word principal is mis-spelled as principle. I would normally ignore spelling mistakes but wanted to post this because this is an important word in REI and would affect other people's ability to search the site.

PrinciPAL = original loan amount and this is the thing that get's amortized over the period of the loan. It can also refer to the original capital invested by an investor. (It has other non-RE meanings as well, such as your school principal.)

PrinciPLE = the basic rules by which you lead your life, or run some other activity, etc.

Josh, I found 358 threads on BP on Google for the word "principle" and they were mostly referring to "principal." You may wish to run some program to modify all the principles into principals. Perhaps you can use some rules to prevent incorrect modifications, for example:

Principles, the plural, should not be corrected because it almost always refers to the fundamental rules of RE, politics, etc.

The phrases "in principle" , "life principle", "fundamental principle", etc. are fairly common and should not be fixed.

The rest of them can probably be fixed through one database update and then maybe you can have something that fixes the mis-spelling in future posts.