Originally Posted by
orbitmic
To be honest, that is stretching things a bit: both are actually covered by the French "macaron" which covers both types (with the same word) but in two different traditions (effectively, the one you refer to as "macaron" here is the 19th century bourgeois patisserie version, but the one you refer to as "macaroon" has just the same name and was already widespread in the 17th century in the French southwest with near Eastern origins from the Middle Ages and which also travelled to Italy as "maccherone" and France as "macarons" during the Enlightenment.
In the English language they are spelled differently, and since the rest of the post I responded to is in English, I assumed that's the spelling we should go with.
Like you say, the French call both types "macaron," but I have yet to see any language using "macaroon" for the flat, almond flour-based cookies with filling between them.