HILLSBORO(UGH) — There's more than one way to skin a cat, but there are exactly two ways to spell the name of this town and they're both official, depending on what you mean by official.

Writing about Hillsboro, or Hillsborough, can get confusing because the two spellings are used frequently and often interchangeably. On the patch worn by every town police officer, the town is clearly Hillsborough, but the local Ford dealership uses the name Hillsboro. The folks at town hall seem to have settled pretty comfortably with adding “ugh” to Hillsboro, but stop by the post office and you'll discover you're back in the 'boro. The confusion can grow with the fact the Hillsborough (or Hillsboro) is in Hillsborough County.

All the name-calling started when a group of folks in town decided to try and make things easier, according to local historians.

In 1894, residents sent a petition to the U.S. Postal Service requesting that Hillsborough be allowed to drop the last three letters of its name to make things a bit simpler for folks, said Iris Campbell, secretary to the board of selectmen.

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, the U.S. Post Office as well as the railroads adopted the shorter spelling,” said town historian Gil Shattuck. “As a result, you see it spelled both ways, even by some of the town departments. The Postal Service still uses the shorter spelling.”

Shattuck said that the push to drop the “ugh” was part of a move to adopt a simpler, phonetic spelling of words in America. With this new spelling notion, words such as “thorough” would become “thoro,” and “though” would shorten to “tho,” but the movement, while popular for a while, never really stuck.

In his book, “The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way,” author and former Dartmouth professor Bill Bryson wrote that the movement was given a real boost in 1906 when industrialist Andrew Carnegie invested $250,000 in the Simplified Spelling Board, an organization tasked with eliminating extra letters from 300 words including the “o” from “you.” Some of those changes stuck, said Bryson, but others clearly did not.

So while the post office accepted the name change, the town and the state have hung onto the traditional spelling and Hillsborough remains, but the confusion gives locals a little something to chuckle about.

“I believe the town is officially called 'Hillsborough' and that's the way it should be,” said Russell Galpin, chairman of the board of selectmen. “But sometimes I use 'Hillsboro' because it's easier.”

nfoster@newstote.com