In 1616 (or thereabouts), Shakespeare included this in his play Coriolanus: “You must enquire your way.” Then in 1633, Joseph Hall wrote a book (with one of those absurdly long 17th century titles), in which he wrote: “To inquire my interpretation of this dreame.”
Ever since, some people have been using “enquire” where others think it ought to be “inquire,” and vice versa. Both forms are in use in the US, where “inquire” is slightly more common, as well as in the UK, where “enquire” has a slight edge. So what’s the difference? The answer is that there isn’t one; just two different spellings of the same word. It’s not unusual, of course, for words to have had different spellings over the years and centuries. What’s out of the ordinary here is that English can’t seem to make up its collective mind about this particular word.
The word arrived in English around the late 1200s, and the way it showed up may be a clue about the ongoing confusion. It was adopted from the French word “enquer.” But around the same time it was also adopted from the Latin word “inquīrĕre.” The controversy began right away.
People in England, who didn’t think particularly highly of the French at the time, used “inquire,” based on the Latin version. But in Scotland, regardless of how they felt about the French, reserved much of their everyday annoyance and complaints for the English, and used “enquire” after the French root, probably because the English were using the other one.
The distinction’s regional nature didn’t last, and by now “enquire” tends to be used to mean casually ask (“I enquired as to the anticipated arrival of the expected omnibus”), and “inquire” is more formal. That’s the way it is in England, at least; the distinction is sort of procedural or contextual. It’s pretty much the same in the US, except that the relative formality of “inquire” and “enquire” is reversed; it’s “enquire” that implies the undertaking of a more formal enquiry.
There isn’t any sign that one or the other spelling is going to be the one everyone settles on. But feel free to keep asking, because as was said in 1526, there’s nothing “whiche forbydeth any persone to inquyre any suche question.”
