Talk:India ink

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I thought this was India ink, not Indian. Anyone? Rmhermen 07:42 Aug 27, 2002 (PDT)

My dictionary says "Indian ink". Doing a google search, I find them divided with a majority of 2/3 (23,700 hits against 12,400) in favor of "India ink". My opinion would therefore be: Which one we use is not so important, but whichever we use, we must make sure that the other is a redirect. Andre Engels

FWIW, I've never heard of "Indian ink", only "India ink". --Brion

One of the dictionaries I have to hand gives only "indian ink" (no capital), the other gives "Indian ink" (with capital) and "India ink" as an alternative. Perhaps it largely depends what side of the Atlantic you're on - I (English) have always used "Indian ink". Tom Stoppard wrote a play called "Indian Ink" which I suppose might want an article one day in the distant future, and India ink seems to be a little bit more common, so perhaps this article should be there. --Camembert

For what it's worth, I've always known it to be India ink. I think that since the ink comes from India, putting it this way also avoids confusion with the "indians" native to North America. I wouldn't necessarily or automatically consider the other way to be incorrect though, just somewhat unclear and therefore slightly awkward. --radiojon 23:13, 31 Aug 2003 (UTC)

The original form was Indian ink. And the ink did not come from India but from the "Indies". --MWAK 07:30, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Contents 1 Why India? 2 Move Proposed 3 Page moved! 4 Talk merged from Talk:India Ink 4.1 Move

[edit] Why India?

The article says the ink comes from China originally..... So why is it called India Ink? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Lengis (talk • contribs)

Poor navigation? ;-)

Otherwise, consider MWAK's explanation above.

Atlant 17:43, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Excellent advice :o).--MWAK 10:48, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

I think the reason is similar to Arabic numbers. The guy named that kind of ink first saw this kind of ink in India. :o).--Shinto 15:48, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Move Proposed

I propose moving this article back to "India Ink", which is where it was in 2006, until somebody moved it apparently in the belief that "India Ink" is "ungrammatical."

Google search gives about 5:3 in favor of "India ink", but many of the "Indian Ink" references seem to be to the Stoppard play.Geoffrey.landis (talk) 15:02, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Page moved!

I moved this page to India Ink, since there seemed to be no significant dissention in the three weeks since I proposed it. Google shows "India ink' as slightly more common usage, and the Oxford English Dictionary (anyway, the compact version I own) shows both. Geoffrey.landis (talk) 05:19, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

No, you didn't move it, properly speaking: You cut and pasted it, leaving the edit history of the "India ink" page behind here. This is a mess that now requires an admin to clean up. --ShelfSkewed Talk 05:41, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

OK, Thanks for doing the clean up. I'd never tried moving a page before; next time I'll check the documentation and try to do it more neatly. Geoffrey.landis (talk) 01:18, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Talk merged from Talk:India Ink

[edit] Move

Apparently this page had been moved to Indian ink. I propose to move that article here, and change the "Indian Ink" article to a redirect (or a link to the play.). Geoffrey.landis (talk) 15:04, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

• I disagree: a) if you were going to do a move it should be to India ink (lower case 'i' on ink)

Right you are, correction noted

and b) you have the redirects, so why bother? On the basis of special:whatlinkshere/Indian ink, I would say there is "no consensus" as to the preferred term. -- RHaworth (Talk | contribs) 16:57, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

To the contrary-- despite the fact that the India ink article doesn't even exist, special:whatlinkshere/Indian ink shows 42 links pointing to it! I'd call 42 links to an article that doesn't exist quite powerful evidence that a lot of people think it's the correct usage! American Heritage dictionary doesn't even list "Indian ink" as a variant. Geoffrey.landis (talk) 19:24, 30 March 2008 (UTC)