American English Spellings in the (Supposed) UK English Dictionary!!

[leec2024]

I am trying to proof a book for a client, but Affinity Publisher 2.4.2 keeps insisting that the spelling is wrong (when it isn't!) and suggesting that I change his correct spelling to the incorrect American versions (I am in the UK).

I thought that software had got over this problem; I am relying on Affinity Publisher to do this work as I cannot afford Adobe Indesign, which I used to use until they went subscription only.

I need to be able to get rid of the American Spellings in the dictionary, preferably by a downloadable UK ONLY dictionary!

[Hangman]

Hi @leec2024 and welcome to the forums,

I'm assuming you have the English (United Kingdom) dictionary selected in the Character panel rather than just the English dictionary which is the US English dictionary...

[leec2024]

Ah...

I had English, not English (United Kingdom).

To be fair, you have to dig a bit to find the option on a MacBook display, and most Mac software seems to take its language settings from the OS when being installed, in my experience.

Many thanks for your help.

[Hangman]

No problem at all, glad normality has been resumed in the spelling department...

[leec2024]

Almost....

It's still complaining about 'optimise' as opposed to 'optimize', and a few similar items, but it's a lot better than it was.

[Hangman]

No problem at all, glad normality has been resumed in the spelling department...

11 minutes ago, leec2024 said:

most Mac software seems to take its language settings from the OS when being installed, in my experience.

I think that is the case for apps like Pages where you can't install dictionaries but not for Publisher where you can download and install both language-specific spelling and hyphenation Hunspell dictionaries from GitHub.

[Hangman]

4 minutes ago, leec2024 said:

It's still complaining about 'optimise' as opposed to 'optimize', and a few similar items, but it's a lot better than it was.

DIFFERENCES: -se and -ze

UK: optimise, maximise, analyse, organisation, specialise
US: optimize, maximize, analyze, organization, specialize

The -ze isn’t just an American thing – us Brits use it too. It’s the preferred spelling for the Oxford University Press, and a fair few self-published books about copywriting written by UK copywriters use the -ze too. The -se is seen as the variant, not the default.

[Alfred]

17 minutes ago, Hangman said:

The -ze isn’t just an American thing – us Brits use it too. It’s the preferred spelling for the Oxford University Press

^^ This ^^

You can use words such as ‘defence’ and ‘practise’ to verify that you’re getting a UK English spell check. The US English spellings are ‘defense’ and ‘practice’, respectively: UK English distinguishes between ‘practice’ (noun) and ‘practise’ (verb) but US English uses the ‘c’ spelling for both.

[leec2024]

Many thanks for the interesting and useful comments.

I will certainly be using these forums again.

[William Overington]

There is en-gb and en-gb-oed as well as the American spellings.

So ideally three dictionaries are needed.

I have tried to use en-gb-oed in my writing, not always getting it correct alas.

Re Pledge 4, perhaps Affinity will provide an en-gb-oed dictionary.

Please note that ISO International Standards use Oxford Dictionary English.

William

 

[William Overington]

Another difference between American English and both sorts of British English is in words like traveled (US) and travelled (GB).

William

 

[Alfred]

2 hours ago, William Overington said:

Another difference between American English and both sorts of British English is in words like traveled (US) and travelled (GB).

I’m sure I’ve seen words like “canceled” in dialogs (sorry, dialogues!) on UK English versions of Windows. It’s actually more logical, since it follows the same pronunciation-based rule that determines whether a word-final r or t is doubled when a suffix is appended.

[William Overington]

10 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I’m sure I’ve seen words like “canceled” in dialogs (sorry, dialogues!) on UK English versions of Windows. It’s actually more logical, since it follows the same pronunciation-based rule that determines whether a word-final r or t is doubled when a suffix is appended.

Can you explain that rule please?

William

[Alfred]

8 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Can you explain that rule please?

William

If (and only if) the primary stress is on the last syllable, you double the final letter. So the past tense of ‘defer’ is ‘deferred’, but the past tense of ‘differ’ is differed’; likewise the past tense of ‘refit’ is ‘refitted’, but the past tense of ‘benefit’ is benefited’. So it’s logical that the past tense of ‘repel’ is ‘repelled’, but it’s illogical for the past tense of ‘travel’ to be ‘travelled’ rather than ‘traveled’.

[William Overington]

I had never known of that rule before now.

But then again, there are lots of things that I don't know about! 😁

William

 

[William Overington]

On the matter of not knowing things, I saw this cartoon recently.

xkcd: Average Familiarity

It was linked from the following post.

What is the ASCII table and How Do You Use It? (unicode.org)

William

 

[Alfred]

5 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I had never known of that rule before now.

I’ve known about the Oxford ‘-ize’ preference for decades, but until a few minutes ago I didn’t know that ‘en-GB-oed’ was a thing.