My question is – "are there any differences between the meanings, connotations and usages of the words debtor and debitor?". The context in which I intend to use the word is a business budget, where it is used as an antonym to the word "creditor"; I wish to find the most appropriate word for this context.
My instinct would be to use debitor where referring to a party who owes a debt to another specified party, and to use debtor to denote a party which is in a state of debt e.g.:
- "Purchaser A is debitor to supplier B"
- "Mr. C is a debtor, and urgently needs to turn his financial state around"
This would make debitor the more appropriate word for my usage. Collins Dictionary appears to support the use of "debitor" in this way. However, debtor can also be used to mean a party which owes a debt to another specific party. So is my instinct correct in this case?
Secondly my text editing software flags debitor as a misspelling, and Collins states that the word is used rarely. Is the word debitor so rare as to be likely to be taken as a misspelling, or seen as an anachronism?
Best Answer
Professor John Lawler wrote in a comment:
Also, some dictionaries seem to support that they're variants: Vocabulary.com, Wiktionary, TFD.
Here's Google Ngrams showing debitor going out of use: