Now I thought I knew all about blond and blonde. And so did an acquaintance, which was why he triumphantly emailed me this link to an article on Guardian.co.uk. It’s about the guitar-wielding Alice Gold, who is described as having “a mane of blond hair” (the cliché police must have been sleeping that day).
Yeah, yeah, I thought, so they’ve left off an “e”. It’s not the end of the world. But as I was frittering around at the time, I looked it up anyway – and I got a bit of a surprise. Now I have always thought it was a simple rule: blond for men, blonde for women, whether as an adjective or a noun. Not that you’d often have cause to refer to a man as “a blond”.
But lo! What is this, in the Guardian’s style guide?
blond
adjective and male noun; blonde female noun: the woman is a blonde, because she has blond hair; the man has blond hair and is, if you insist, a blond
Goodness. So they would call Marilyn Monroe a “blond bombshell” rather than a “blonde bombshell”? This shook my world a little, so I checked The Times’s style guide too. It said, simply:
blond for men, blonde for women
This made me feel a little better, but I still wasn’t completely satisfied. I looked it up in my Oxford Shorter Dictionary at home, which has never let me down before, but the explanation was so incomprehensible (even after three readings and a second opinion) that it didn’t help at all.
Collins is clearer. It accepts both blond and blonde as adjectives and nouns, but specifies that blond is masculine:
blonde or (masc) blond adj 1 (of hair) of a light colour; fair 2 (of a people or a race) having fair hair, a light complexion, and, typically, blue or grey eyes noun 3 a person having light-coloured hair and skin [c15 from OF blond (fem blonde), prob. of Gmc origin]
So… I failed to find confirmation for my own understanding that there was a strict gender divide between the two. But I also failed to find any reason for the entry in the Guardian’s style guide. Is it connected to the avoidance of feminine designations (the Guardian uses “actor” for both actors and actresses, and so on)? But that doesn’t quite explain it – surely they would then use blond for the noun too. I am most confused. Does anyone else know (or care)?
