alt Hacker News> (it's from Latin "centrum": the R goes after the T, and there is no need whatsoever to revise that.)
Why does it matter how it was spelled in Latin? English is not Latin.
In the era of ubiquitous access to dictionaries, I'm not sure the benefits of having spelling reflect etymology rather than pronunciation outweigh the cost.
The first part of my argument is this: the word centrum still has a cognate in numerous modern languages, which use the TR letter order:
French: centre
Italian: centro
Czech: centrum # identical to Latin!
Swedish: centrum
[... numerous others ...]
The "TR" order of the letters in the "centrum" cognate is still alive in modern languages and their orthography, and so is even the "centrum" word itself.
The second part of my argument is that some contemporary dialects of English itself, like British and Canadian, use "centre"; using the "centre" spelling is a contemporary practice, and not a retrogression toward Latin.
The third part of my my argument is that changing "centre" to "center" is a gratuitous change that brings no benefit; it has no redeeming value.