Traveling Plan Travel is the movement of people between distant geographical locations

See also: Air safety and Automobile safety

Travelers in a British Airways 747 airplane. Air travel is a common means of transport.

MS Skania ferry in the port of Szczecin
Authorities emphasize the importance of taking precautions to ensure travel safety.^[16] When traveling abroad, the odds favor a safe and incident-free trip, however, travelers can be subject to difficulties, crime and violence.^[17] Some safety considerations include being aware of one's surroundings,^[16] avoiding being the target of a crime,^[16] leaving copies of one's passport and itinerary information with trusted people,^[16] obtaining medical insurance valid in the country being visited^[16] and registering with one's national embassy when arriving in a foreign country.^[16] Many countries do not recognize drivers' licenses from other countries; however most countries accept international driving permits.^[18] Automobile insurance policies issued in one's own country are often invalid in foreign countries, and it is often a requirement to obtain temporary auto insurance valid in the country being visited.^[18] It is also advisable to become oriented with the driving rules and regulations of destination countries.^[18] Wearing a seat belt is highly advisable for safety reasons; many countries have penalties for violating seatbelt laws.^[18]
It’s wonderful to travel—to meet new people, see new places, experience different cultures, live life the way life is lived somewhere else. Plenty of good things are associated with travel, but there’s one particular issue that can make traveling annoying: the spelling. Travel is easy enough to spell and not at all confusing, but “traveling,” “traveler,” “traveled”? These words are a common cause of confusion because some people spell them with one L while others use two.

Traveling or travelling depends on where is your audience. Traveling is the preferred spelling in the U.S. Travelling is the preferred spelling in the UK or in the Commonwealth. This American-British spelling difference carries for other forms: traveled or travelled and traveler or traveller.

Here’s a tip: Want to make sure your writing always looks great? Grammarly can save you from misspellings, grammatical and punctuation mistakes, and other writing issues on all your favorite websites.
Article icon
Your writing, at its best
Be the best writer in the office.
To clarify, if you look through books or magazines for examples, you’ll see that both spellings are used, but the two-L version tends to be used in publications that also use spellings like “colour” or “flavour.” Those publications are written in British English, while the ones that use shorter spellings—“traveled,” “flavor,” and “color”—are written in American English. So the difference between “traveling” and “travelling” is really a variation of dialect. Both spellings are correct. Or, more precisely, neither one of them is wrong.
Traveling vs. Travelling
The word travel has more than one syllable—it’s a multisyllabic word. In American English, when a multisyllabic word ends in a vowel and a consonant (in that order), you double the consonant when adding a suffix only if the stress falls on the final syllable. For instance, in the word repel, the stress falls on the final syllable, which means that you double the consonant when you add a suffix: repelling. But in travel, the stress falls on the first syllable, so there’s no doubling.A map of part of the world showing North America and the word "Traveling" in blue. Great Britain and the word "Travelling" is shown in yellow.“Traveling” and “travelling” shared the same fate as many other words in the English language that have two different spellings. The person who’s usually credited (or blamed) for this is Noah Webster—the Webster of Merriam-Webster dictionary fame. He was a linguist and lexicographer who greatly influenced American English. Webster preferred the shorter versions of many words that had multiple spellings. He included the shorter versions in his dictionaries, and, over time, they became dominant in the United States. At the same time, the rest of the English-speaking world gravitated toward the longer spellings. So, while both Americans and Brits can travel, the former can enjoy traveling while the latter can enjoy travelling.

The United States is pretty much alone in using the shorter form. Canada and Australia generally follow the rules of British English, and that’s why Canadians and Australians can be fond of travelling, not traveling.

By now, you probably know when to use which spelling—it should conform to the place your audience is. If you’re writing a paper for a college class in the United States, you should use the shorter spelling. However, if you live in the United States but are applying for a job in Australia, you could instead choose to use the spelling they prefer.

Travelling and Traveling: Examples

As a visitor traveling from the United States, you must obtain a visa, which you can apply for before you leave for Cuba. —Conde Nast Traveler

As the reporters who traveled to the Group of 20 summit meeting with President Obama from Hawaii piled out and walked under the wing to record his arrival… —The New York Times

​Passengers travelling to Bristol Airport are being urged to leave extra time as roadworks clog up a major link road for an entire month. —Bristol Post

Originally from Athens, and having lived in London for five years, he’d travelled on the train specifically to head in to town to “see the drunken crowds. It should be fun.” —The Guardian

Spelling is typically clear-cut in modern English: forty unfailingly betrays four; the sweet treat after dinner is spelled dessert, not desert.

But some words have two forms that appear often enough in edited text to make it clear that something else is going on. And so it is with forms of the verb travel: traveled and travelled, and traveling and travelling.

woman looking at departures board
It might have a different spelling wherever you're going.

One or Two L's?

If you look at where the single l forms originate and where the double l forms originate a pattern emerges: in the United States, traveled and traveling predominate, and everywhere else travelled and travelling are preferred.

The reason mostly comes down to one man we at Merriam-Webster hold especially dear: Noah Webster. Our lexicographical father (brothers George and Charles Merriam bought the rights to Noah Webster’s 1841 dictionary after Webster died) was a great believer in spelling reform and wanted English spelling to make more sense—and if the English of his homeland had more logic to it than its British parent, so much the better. He decided that travel needed only one l in its past and present participle forms.

Webster’s logic is the reason behind the spelling of canceled and cancelled as well: in the U.S., they have just one l, but elsewhere two l’s are the norm.

American English Words that Use 2 L's

Webster didn’t think all double l’s needed to be reduced to one, however: in cases in which the accent, or emphasis, is on the syllable with the l, two l’s are preserved: expelled and expelling; controlled and controlling; patrolled and patrolling.