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by MattBlissett 2145 days ago
Some of the international use might be because the United Nations uses Oxford spelling [1]. My employer does too.

GNU Aspell has several variants of "British English", including "British English (United Kingdom) [-ize suffixes and with accents]". KDE seems to use the same dictionary, so in KDE applications I have full support for "Oxford spelling".

There's a Firefox extension which includes -ize endings, but also includes -ise endings, so it's less useful.

[1] http://dd.dgacm.org/editorialmanual/ed-guidelines/style/spel...

[2] http://aspell.net/

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/british-engli...

2 comments

Not all of the ise/ize endings are interchangable, so the Firefox extension might be correct. -ize is only applicable for words with a Greek root, I believe, which is why choosing Oxford English was hardly a masterstroke on my part but it does make things more interesting.

I have little experience of Aspell short of seeing it pop up as a dependency now and then, but I will now try and attempt incorporating it into my Mac's dictionary, ideally it would work on iOS as well.

The Firefox extension includes both versions, so I see a red underline for advertize (usage is archaic), but not for either realize or realise.

  aspell -d en_GB-ize-w_accents list < file-to-check
is the command to merely list spelling errors.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) uses British English too.