Variant English Spellings

Wiki uses an AmericanEnglish dictionary for spell checking, but our contributors come from a more diverse background.

Let's list commonly-used words Wiki recognizes in their American spelling, but misses other nation's "correct" spellings.

British:

(But see RealizeVersusRealise regarding the correctness of -ise, -isation.)

Canadian & British:

Canadian: Australian: Other:

There are, of course, some words which do not have a best-established spelling. The usual resolution is simply to be allow a choice of spellings. A few examples are:

In the mid-1980s, the schools in Livingston, California required 14 year olds to memorize the spelling of the preamble to the American DeclarationOfIndependence. The spelling in the original DeclarationOfIndependence is quite sensible, including many doubled consonants before "ed" and "ing". The dumbed down textbooks in Livingston's schools did not double many of these consonants. As a result, the history teachers insisted that the students memorize the preamble using the wrong spellings. It is an example of how these history teachers did not include original documents in their history classes.

No. But there is something wrong with a "history" education that insists that the original spellings in the DeclarationOfIndependence are incorrect, especially when those spellings are valid in spelling class.

Useful web sites:

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