Electric Wheelchair, Power Wheelchair, Powerchair or Power Chair: Which is correct?
Power Chair, powerchair, electric wheelchair, powered wheelchair and other definitions are all used to describe the equipment we use to get around in. Which are correct? One writer, Gervais Whale, goes online to see which is the most favoured definition in use on the web today.
Defining Power Chairs
“It’s not an electric chair,” says one user crossly. “It’s a power chair. Electric chairs are for killing people; power chairs are for moving people around.”
Point taken. However, that still leaves a number of other terms, all of which seem acceptable to different people. However, whereas power chair (powerchair?) users often have strong ideas on what is the correct terminology, others are less certain.
“I’d just type in electric wheelchair if I was looking for something like that,” said an American friend when I was discussing power chairs. “Well, you are not a power chair user,” I retorted.
Still, look at the words people use to find pages relating to power chairs, and he might be correct. Going to Google Adword tools, which give you an idea of what keywords people are putting into the search engine, and you find the following:
- power chairs
- power wheelchairs
- powerchairs
- electric wheelchair
- powered wheelchairs
- powered chair
And of course more variations of the same. Interestingly, though, the search term “power chair” and “power chairs” seemed to be marginally ahead of the other terms in search volume.
To get more details regarding search volume, we decided to use SEO book’s keyword tool. This has the disadvantage that it only focusses on key words used in America - but the advantage that it covers a range of different search engines, not just Google. The results were as follows:
| Keyword term | Daily estimate |
|---|---|
| Electric wheelchairs | 138 |
| Power wheelchairs | 136 |
| Power wheelchair | 76 |
| Electric wheelchair | 115 |
| Power chairs | 67 |
| Power chair | 58 |
| Powerchairs | 4 |
| Powerchair | 12 |
| Electric power wheelchair | 1 |
Interesting results - we were especially surprised that electric wheelchair beat power chair when the latter term seems to be more popular on disabled sites. Of course, these results could be partly due to a linguistic variation.
We decided to try another method of finding the correct usage - typing the terms into google and seeing which came out the most. The results are as follows:
- “Electric wheelchair” 456,000
- “power chair” 333,000
- “powerchair” 447,000
- “power wheelchair” 360,000
The results are way to close to give a definitive answer as to which is correct. After all, we want to aim for a descriptive rather than prescriptive accuracy. Still, we thought we would consult the dictionaries.
Dictionary.com reported for power chair that:
There are no dictionary entries for power chair, but power, chair are spelled correctly.
Cambridge dictionary also fails to provide a definition for power chair. Nor does Wikipedia mention the word power chair, calling the chairs "Electric Powered Chairs", or EPW’s. Why do the Americans always have to reduce things to letters?
It seems that, for the moment at least, anything goes - as long as you don’t use the term electric chair. In which case I am going to continue calling the things power chairs or, just to beat the Americans at their own game, PW’s.
