In the piece this week on the word mense, in the description of Burns' poem, the word "dialog" was used without the ue on the end. I am seeing this more and more in print. Is this variant now the norm? What about prologue epilogue and other words that similarly end in ue?

Jim Barborak

It looks like dialog started taking off in the early to mid '80s in both American English and British English, more drastically in AmE. It is still much less common in BrE but surpassed diaqlogue in AmE in 1995. This according to Google ngrams, anyway.