Preventatives - better than cures

Whenever I hear the word "preventative" I think of – if you'll pardon the expression – haplology  (or rather, the inverse of haplology, which is the shortening of a word by dropping a repeated syllable: "probly", for example...

<tangent>
I rather wish, not without a generous dash of whimsy, that the lecturer who introduced me to the word had called it "haplogy" (but there's only so much whimsicality a body can stand...)
</tangent>

...). The word (preventative, this time) makes  me wonder two things:

• What's the difference (if any) between "preventative" and "preventive"?
• Is  "preventive" just a haplologized (dunno if that's a word, but it is now – I suspect that in the linguistics world some mealy-mouthed circumlocution would be preferred; something like
  "form that has undergone haplology"

Ask Google if there's a difference, and one of first hits is unequivocal:

Dictionary.com gives the same definition for both preventive and preventative. Merriam-Webster.com places a direct link to preventive instead of a separate definition for preventative. The words mean the same thing. {my emphasis}

The source for this unbending certainty is the Gramarly blog (which long-standing readers of this blog will recognize from an earlier rant of mine, about ten years ago). It goes on:

Around 1635, someone had the idea of adding the -ive suffix to the verb prevent. Around the same time, preventative evolved as a variant spelling. According to Google Ngram Viewer, preventive is and has always been the more popular choice.

The Google Ngram Viewer is a new discovery for me; I think it probably deserves a Tezzy (that's my invented award, mentioned fairly often in this blog: "Time-wasting Site of the Year") but I haven't put it through its paces ye... (Hang on though, "putting it through its paces" will constitute time-wasting: so I should just cut to the chase and award a Tezzy).

Here is the output for the two prev-ive words:

The shorter word has a clear edge; a simple Google search suggests it's around four times more common; But "preventative" crops up more than 100,000,000 times, though; so it couldn't be called rare. That Gramarly blog, though, says it's virtually unused across the Pond:

As usual, there is a difference between American and British English. Preventative is only a little less common than preventive for the Brits, whereas Americans rarely use it. 

Hmm... Do they really "mean the same"?  Etymonline dates "preventive" to the 1630s and "preventative" to the 1650s. That Gramarly blog splits the difference and gives "Around 1635...[re: preventive, and] Around the same time ... [re preventative]."

I suspect that "preventive" appeared first, and at least half a generation later (I'm not sure this justifies Gramarly's 'Around the same time') someone made a false analogy with words like preserve/preservation/preservative to invent the triplet prevent/preventation/preventative. Going by the Google Ngram Viewer output, "preventative" scarcely got off the ground for the first 100 years. If this is what happened (and  the preserve/preservation/preservative triplet had been around for well over a century before the 1630s, so the model was at least available for wordsmiths), my feeling is that, unless there  is a strong collocation for "preventative" [I'm looking into this;  stay tuned for an update] "preventive" is preferable.

b

Update: 2023.02.27.15:40 – Added PS

PS

In the British National Corpus, hits for 'preventive' are found in only 97 collocations (when directly preceding a noun); and of those only the most common nine make it into double figures; while hits for 'preventative' are found in only 38 contexts; and of those only the most common five make it into double figures:

In COCA  meanwhile (ten times bigger, having a billion words [as compared to  BNC's paltry 100 million]) so it includes more one-off collocations (that is, ones that are represented only once), hits for 'preventive' are found in 362 collocations (when directly preceding a noun); and of those only the most common eight make it into treble figures; while hits for 'preventative' are found in only 208 contexts; and of those only the most common fifteen make it into double figures: So 'preventative' is less common in American English than in British English, but it's far from "rare".

<mea-culpa>
I was too quick, though, to accept the near-certainty of the Gramarly blogger.

North America is a big place, and the blogger was probably reporting a tendency present in their own speech community. In fact, this is the sort of issue that brings out the worst in self-styled grammar-guardians, and a single college lecturer may have passed on a prejudice against "preventative" (one that I share, not that I'm proud of the instinct) to  hundreds of trainee teachers, who then passed it on to tens of thousands  of students, who now go around saying things like "Americans rarely use it".

</mea-culpa>