I do not often come across the word catsup, but I do see it every once in a while, and I know it means ketchup. What I don't know is why they both came to be words for the same thing (though ketchup is much more popular). Dictionary.com says catsup was invented later as an anglicization, but even that raises questions. Why and when did someone try to anglicize ketchup, and why didn't it ketch on?
Learn English – Why do “catsup” and “ketchup” coexist
etymologyword-usage
Best Answer
John Ayto, Arcade Dictionary of Word Origins (1990) has an interesting entry for ketchup that agrees in part with Etymology Online's analysis (cited in Unreason's answer):
Glynnis Chantrell, The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories (2002) tells a different story:
Bryan Garner, Garner's Modern American Usage, second edition (2003) weighs in with this assessment:
Robert Hendrickson, The QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, fourth edition (2008) has this lengthy discussion:
Joseph Shipley, Dictionary of Word Origins (1945) has a brief but interesting treatment as well:
Perhaps the most striking thing about Shipley's entry for ketchup is his spelling of "our most familiar form" as "tomato ketchup." Shipley was an American writing at the end of World War II. If you check the Ngram chart below, you'll see that catsup was substantially more common than ketchup in Google Books content published in 1945, and had been for most of the previous three decades.
Ernest Weekley, An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1921) favors the spelling ketchup even more decisively, referring to catsup as an example of "folk-etym[ology] perversion." Weekley's entry for ketchup is bare-bones:
It is certainly true that what the English understood by ketchup was a spicy sauce dominated by fish, as is evident from the recipe for ketchup that appears in Charles Carter, The London and Country Cook: Or, Accomplished Housewife (1749): which specifies using "twelve or fourteen anchovies" with less than a pint and a half of wine vinegar and port, plus shallots, horseradish, ginger, pepper, mace, nutmeg, and lemon peel.
The Ngram chart for ketchup (blue line) versus catsup (red line) for the period 1700–2005 is volatile:
Overall, ketchup broke away from catsup only in the early 1980s—a time frame that roughly coincides with the shift in spelling of at least two major brands of tomato ketchup from catsup to ketchup. According Aisha Harris, "Is There a Difference Between Ketchup and Catsup?" in Slate (April 22, 2013), Del Monte switched its spelling to ketchup in 1988, and Hunt's did so "significantly earlier." But the same article reports that Heinz, the biggest U.S. purveyor of the stuff, originally sold the product "as 'Heinz Tomato Catsup,' but changed the spelling early on to distinguish it from competitors."
I suspect that the radically different trajectories of the two spellings since around 1980 are largely due to changes in product spelling by major purveyors of tomato ketchup during that period. That is to say, I can't think of any other circumstance in the past 36 years that would explain the change.