"Philosopher's Stone" is the British name of the Book; "Sorceror's Stone" is the American name. In Real History, Alchemists like Nicholas Flamel tried to discover the PS with all the power defined; in the story, Flamel succeeded.

The Marketing Men in suits assume that Americans are dumb and would think "HP and the PS" was a text-book on Philosophy, so they changed the title.

Good summary Rhemus!

Both the book and the motion picture were released in the US with the revised title Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, citing the reason that the American and British uses of the word philosopher were slightly different, giving the book title a different meaning in the two countries.

Scholastic, the book's US publisher, also "translated" the original book into American English. The spelling as well as many words and expressions were changed.

This led to criticism by many readers. The New York Times ran an article titled "Harry Potter, Minus a Certain Flavour" on July 10, 2000, which heavily criticised Scholastic's decision to Americanise the US Harry Potter editions.

The U.S have all ways got to be different with their american english why cant every one just call it one or the other?

But I think this is quite unfair. I mean, they've got their own spelling, so why shouldn't they use it? I don't think a lot of Americans would read books which contain a lot of "shall"s and "shan't"s!

No there really is no difference.

The difference is that some peeps call it 1 other peeps call it the other

American children are allergic to dictionaries.

Hey, buddy, please don't bash the US. We didn't ask for the publishers to change the book. I wish they didn't. It's not that much different. But just because the Publishers decided to "Americanize" the books doesn't mean we're all stupid and don't read or use dictionaries.

The person who created this topic asked what the difference was. Not why is the US stupid. Lay off us, please, ok?

And a lot of the words are still British English in the US versions. "Mum" and "trainers" are both still in the books. We don't use those words. (although I do say "mum" now.) However the only reason why they didn't change those words is because Jo insisted that they didn't.

And I think it's stupid how the covers to the books change as well. I like the British covers more than the US's.

Hey, I AM American. Maybe I should have said, "The publishers think American children are allergic to dictionaries."

I think Scholastic did its readers (including me) a great disservice by Americanizing the books, especially changing Philosopher's Stone to Sorceror's Stone. If American kids are unfamiliar with the ancient concept of the PS, they would have learned of it while reading the book. It's not like SS is a concept of which anyone would have heard, since it doesn't exist outside the dumbed-down version of these books.

Sorcerer - a person who practices sorcery; black magician; wizard.

Philosopher - a person who offers views or theories on profound questions in ethics, metaphysics, logic, and other related fields.


(From Dictionary.com)

The people we call alchemists called themselves philosophers. Go figure.