Vacation - vocation

The spellchecker will allow you to confuse these two words. Don’t let it!

• Vacation means ‘holiday’. It is becoming more common in the UK, where it used to be used only by lawyers and Universities. It has always been more common in American English.

• Vocation comes from the Latin for ‘calling’. In its more general sense, it means any profession (my vocation is that of a teacher), but originally it was limited to those who had been ‘called’ by God to a particular career or job. “I have felt a vocation” was at one time a way of saying ‘I shall make my career as a Christian clergyman’, though it could also be used to indicate a task. The vocation of William Wilberforce, in this sense, was to fight slavery.