UK people who, like me, have teeny tiny issues with spelling tend to rely on spell checkers just a bit. If, like me, they tend to use any old random text editor rather than some overblown monstrosity like Word, they have to go through a dance with each one, adding in words that Americans can’t spell properly. It’s most annoying, like training puppy after puppy.
I want a text file, nothing more, that contains all these words with their z’s replaced with s’s and their u’s added after the o’s and before the r’s. Then I can go through it and add each and every one of them to the dictionary. Anyone seen one?
I can immediately see (if I’m looking) if a word is spelt wrongly. I do appreciate that it’s a gift that not everyone has, though. Spelling is an arbitrary tyranny and despite the efforts of Dr Johnson onward, there are still plenty of words with no single universally agreed spelling, which you have just stumbled upon. Do you know how many people realize that ‘color’ should be realised as ‘colour’? And so on. I’m sure that as a former bookseller you know of ‘Mother Tongue’ by Bill Bryson (written before he became a travel writer who only went to places where everyone is a white European), which goes through (not ‘thru’, despite the attempts to popularis(z?)e that in early 70s Marvel comics) all this stuff.
So go forth and spell things how they look right to you. And don’t bother with the remarks of pedants. Many people aged 40+ will tell you how they had spelling, grammar, and punctuation beaten into them with the cane. But if that’s the case then how is it that very few people of that age can use the apostrophe correctly?
Yes, you’re right and all, but the Amercians are still wrong and it’s annoying.
Are you looking for something like this
I think i’m right in saying that the OED recommends using zs for words like organize. You may not worship the OED and all its children like what I do, though. What a fantastic work of reference it is – and its archives – well, words fail me :)
What’s worse is that even when you *are* using MS Word (heaven forfend) and set it to the UK dictionary. It *still* can’t spell. Have you tried entering “liaise”? Appalling.
http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/