American and British English spelling differences
Most words ending in an unstressed ‑our in British English (e.g., behaviour, colour, favour, flavour, harbour, honour, humour, labour, neighbour, rumour, splendour) end in ‑or in American English (behavior, color, favor, flavor, harbor, honor, humor, labor, neighbor, rumor, splendor).
Wherever the vowel is unreduced in pronunciation (e.g., devour, contour, flour, hour, paramour, tour, troubadour, and velour), the spelling is uniform everywhere.
Throughout the late 19th and early to mid-20th century, most Canadian newspapers chose to use the American usage of -or endings, originally to save time and money in the era of manual movable type.
[21][22] The difference is most common for words ending in -bre or -tre: British spellings calibre, centre, fibre, goitre, litre, lustre, manoeuvre, meagre, metre (length), mitre, nitre, ochre, reconnoitre, sabre, saltpetre, sepulchre, sombre, spectre, theatre (see exceptions) and titre all have -er in American spelling.
In the United States, following the publication of Webster's Dictionary in the early 19th century, American English became more standardized, exclusively using the -er spelling.
These include September, October, November, December, amber, blister, cadaver, chamber, chapter, charter, cider, coffer, coriander, cover, cucumber, cylinder, diaper, disaster, enter, fever, filter, gender, leper, letter, lobster, master, member, meter (measuring instrument), minister, monster, murder, number, offer, order, oyster, powder, proper, render, semester, sequester, sinister, sober, surrender, tender, and tiger.
The e preceding the r is kept in American-inflected forms of nouns and verbs, for example, fibers, reconnoitered, centering, which are fibres, reconnoitred, and centring respectively in British English.
[24] The difference relates only to root words; -er rather than -re is universal as a suffix for agentive (reader, user, winner) and comparative (louder, nicer) forms.
The spelling connexion is now rare in everyday British usage, its use lessening as knowledge of Latin attenuates,[12] and it has almost never been used in the US: the more common connection has become the standard worldwide.
[37] Connexion was still the house style of The Times of London until the 1980s and was still used by Post Office Telecommunications for its telephone services in the 1970s, but had by then been overtaken by connection in regular usage (for example, in more popular newspapers).
Examples (with non-American letter in bold): aeon, anaemia, anaesthesia, caecum, caesium, coeliac, diarrhoea, encyclopaedia, faeces, foetal, gynaecology, haemoglobin, haemophilia, leukaemia, oesophagus, oestrogen, orthopaedic,[note 1] palaeontology, paediatric, paedophile.
The chemical haem (named as a shortening of haemoglobin) is spelled heme in American English, to avoid confusion with hem.
Words that can be spelled either way in American English include aesthetics and archaeology (which usually prevail over esthetics and archeology),[12] as well as palaestra, for which the simplified form palestra is described by Merriam-Webster as "chiefly Brit[ish].
There is no reduction of Latin -ae plurals (e.g., larvae); nor where the digraph
The Macquarie Dictionary also notes a growing tendency towards replacing ae and oe with e worldwide and with the exception of manoeuvre, all British or American spellings are acceptable variants.
[59] The spelling -ise is more commonly used in UK mass media and newspapers,[58] including The Times (which switched conventions in 1992),[60] The Daily Telegraph, The Economist and the BBC.
[63] In Ireland, India, Australia, and New Zealand[64] -ise spellings strongly prevail: the -ise form is preferred in Australian English at a ratio of about 3:1 according to the Macquarie Dictionary.
(The alternate convention offered as a matter of choice may have been due to the fact that although there were an increasing number of American- and British-based dictionaries with Canadian Editions by the late 1970s, these were largely only supplemental in terms of vocabulary with subsequent definitions.
Hart's Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford states: "In verbs such as analyse, catalyse, paralyse, -lys- is part of the Greek stem (corresponding to the element -lusis) and not a suffix like -ize.
Words such as demagogue, pedagogue, synagogue, from the Greek noun ἀγωγός agōgos ("guide"), are seldom used without -ue even in American English.
Both British and American English use the spelling -gue with a silent -ue for certain words that are not part of the -ogue set, such as tongue, plague, vague, and league.
[76] The final consonant of an English word is sometimes doubled in both American and British spelling when adding a suffix beginning with a vowel, for example strip/stripped, which prevents confusion with stripe/striped and shows the difference in pronunciation (see digraph).
These words have monosyllabic cognates always written with -ll: pall (verb), roll, fill, stall, skill, thrall, will.
Cases where a single l nevertheless occurs in both American and British English include null→annul, annulment; till→until (although some prefer til to reflect the single l in until, sometimes using a leading apostrophe ('til); this should be considered a hypercorrection as till predates the use of until); and others where the connection is not clear or the monosyllabic cognate is not in common use in American English (e.g., null is used mainly as a technical term in law, mathematics, and computer science).
In the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, it is more common to end some past tense verbs with a "t" as in learnt or dreamt rather than learned or dreamed.
Canada uses both systems; in Australia, draft is used for technical drawings, is accepted for the "current of air" meaning, and is preferred by professionals in the nautical sense.
Canadian and Australian usage is mixed, although Commonwealth writers generally hyphenate compounds of the form noun plus phrase (such as editor-in-chief).
[190] This does not apply to abbreviations that are pronounced as individual letters (referred to by some as "initialisms"), such as US, IBM, or PRC (the People's Republic of China), which are virtually always written as upper case.
[191] Contractions where the final letter is present are often written in British English without full stops/periods (Mr, Mrs, Dr, Fr, and St — for "Saint" but not for "Street").
[198] The convention used to be, and in American English still is, to put full stops (periods) and commas inside the quotation marks, irrespective of the sense.
