I just learned that a word "Authoritative" exists. Up until now I have always used the word "Authorative", which I must have picked up along the way when I was browsing some technical documentation (I'm a software engineer).
I have looked up "Authorative" in Merriam Webster and on Wiktionary, and the word does not exist there. However, a general Google search for "Authorative" turns up quite a few references. Are all these people (including myself) really using a mis-spelled word, or is "Authorative" just a variant spelling?
Best Answer
Authorative is a misspelling.
I looked up "authorative" in as many online dictionaries as I could find (well, actually, I had OneLook Dictionary Search do it for me, but same effect), and found only one result, in Wordnik. However, that one result does not actually contain a definition, just some examples of use. All of the examples clearly meant to say "authoritative".
Google is immaterial here: people misspell things on the internet. If you mean to say that something is
then you need to write authoritative.
(Note that the reason for this is that this is an adjectival form of authority, not of author.)