employen

Employen is a historical spelling variant of the English verb employ. It is found in some Early Modern English texts (roughly from the 14th to the 17th centuries) as the infinitive form “to employen” or in other inflected forms where the -en ending was part of the period’s verb conjugation. The contemporary standard spelling is "employ."

Usage and decline: The standardization of English spelling during the 18th century reduced variant forms like employen. Today, employen is considered archaic and is primarily of interest to linguists, philologists, editors, and scholars studying historical texts. In modern editing, the form is usually normalized to employ, though it may be retained in quotations to preserve period language or stylistic effect.

Language study and significance: The existence of employen illustrates historical orthographic variation and the evolution of English verb conjugation. It reflects broader patterns in which spelling was less standardized and inflectional endings were more productively used across dialects and time periods. The term is typically encountered in discussions of historical texts, linguistic history, and paleography rather than in contemporary prose.

Relation to related terms: Emmploy, employ, and related nouns such as employer, employee, and employment share the same root as employen and the modern form employ. Studying this variant helps illuminate how modern English spelling and conjugation came to differ from earlier forms.