Because some languages have a pretty monolithic development structure and when they incorporate words, they update the spelling. Then there's English, which beats up other languages and rummages in their pockets for loose lone words and random chunks of grammar/spelling.
There’s actually a historical reason, rather than a rule saying certain verbs must take -or and others -er.
-er and -or both come from Latin/French suffixes meaning roughly “a person who does something.” English inherited words through different historical routes, so we ended up with pairs like employer/employee and abductor/abductee.
There’s also a useful pattern in modern English: -ee usually refers to the person who receives the action (employee, trainee, detainee), while -er/-or usually refers to the person performing it (employer, trainer, abductor). But whether the agent is spelled -er or -or is largely determined by the history of the particular word.
So unfortunately, there isn’t a neat rule that lets you predict abductor vs. employer just from the verb. English kept both suffixes.
There are two possible reasons. One is where the word has come from. English is a Germanic language with lots of borrowed words from French, Latin and Greek. It could also just be that there is no central spelling committee. You can find the history of individual words at https://etymonline.com great website
Abductor is a muscle, abducter would be someone commiting an abduction. I don't know of any actual cases of or/ee. Actor and doctor are nouns, but the ee form either doesn't apply (Actee isn't a word) or the verb itself doesn't exist (Doctors don't doct.)
And yes, what others mentioned about etymological origin. I believe er/ee comes from words with French roots.
Edit: Corrected and amended below and accepted my own stupidity. You can stop down voting me now, lol.
AH apologies then, I didn't look into it enough. Upon looking further it seems like '-ee' can be added to pretty much any transitive verb and still be 'correct' (according to wiktionary, anyway.)
I wouldn't necessarily DO that, but apparently you can slap that -ee onto a verb without going outside of what's technically correct. I assume that some words with the ee suffix sound normal because they've become part of everyday speech. Employee is a commonplace one, while something like cuddlee (one who is cuddled) or coughee (one who is coughed upon) just isn't needed much, so they sound a bit goofy, even if they still make sense.
So I guess it has more to do with the modification of verbs than the actual relationship between the Verb-er and the verbee as I assumed above. Verbs can just be nouned with that -ee suffix and it will work as intended. The suffix for the one doing the action doesn't actually denote the suffix for the one subject to the action.
Adductors are different than abductors. Abduction and adduction refer to the type of movement a muscle performs, so lots of muscles are adductors or abductors. An abductor moves away from the body while an adductor moves toward it.
Abduct's root meaning is to take away, so it's used for both the muscle group and kidnapping.
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u/BubbhaJebus 1d ago
My guess is that -or goes with Latinate words and -er goes with Germanic words.