cliché: Style Guide Spelling Decisions (AP, Chicago, MLA, APA)

How major style guides rule on "cliché"

AP drops the accent for typesetting simplicity; Chicago and academic guides retain it.

The disagreement on "cliché" is an example of whether to retain accents from source languages, the category of style-guide differences that most often confuses copy editors and creates inconsistency across long documents. Below is a guide-by-guide breakdown, drawn directly from the published editions cited.

What the divergence actually means

Unlike many compound-modernization decisions where style guides eventually converge, "cliché" continues to show genuine divergence between major guides. The AP Stylebook treats this as a settled call; Chicago Manual leaves more flexibility; and Merriam-Webster, as a descriptive dictionary, records both forms. Source: Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition

The APA Publication Manual diverges here: it specifies "cliché" as the form preferred for academic writing in psychology and behavioral-science journals. APA's reasoning typically tracks scientific publishing conventions rather than newspaper-style economy. Source: APA Publication Manual, 7th Edition

Merriam-Webster lists "cliché (also cliche)", which serves as the lexicographic baseline for U.S. style decisions. Because Merriam-Webster's entries reflect aggregated published usage rather than editorial preference, when a guide says "follow Merriam-Webster", as APA does, that effectively delegates the call to whichever spelling has dominated the published corpus. Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Garner's Modern English Usage classifies the "cliché" / "cliche" pair on its Language-Change Index, a five-stage scale measuring whether a once-disputed form has been accepted into Standard English. For whether to retain accents from source languages, Garner's typically rates the dominant form at Stage 4 ("ubiquitous but objected to by traditionalists") or Stage 5 ("fully accepted"). Source: Garner's Modern English Usage, 5th Edition

Practical guidance for editors

For working writers, the practical rule is straightforward: in journalism, follow AP; in academic writing in the humanities, follow MLA or Chicago; in social-science publishing, follow APA; in book publishing, follow Chicago. When no house style applies, Merriam-Webster's main entry is the safest default. The differences across these guides on "cliché" reflect not disagreement about correctness but different audiences and editorial pressures.

Editorial context

Published-corpus evidence underscores the ascendancy of "cliche" over "cliché" in American English, with Google Books Ngrams showing the unaccented form surpassing its accented counterpart around the 1920s amid the era's typesetting constraints that favored plain ASCII-like characters in linotype machines. This practical divergence from French etymology gained momentum through midcentury mass-market publishing, where speed trumped orthographic purity. By the 1980s, "cliche" accounted for over 90 percent of tokens in U.S. books, a ratio echoed in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), where it nears 99 percent today. Hollywood churns out one predictable *cliche*-ridden blockbuster after another. Such data reveal how usage in high-output registers like journalism and trade nonfiction has reshaped norms, pressuring even accent-retentive guides toward accommodation despite lingering scholarly preference for the diaeresis.

Cross-references

For the dictionary entry, frequency data, and pronunciation of cliché, see the main word page. For other style-guide spelling decisions in this category, browse all style-guide spelling rulings.