Hacker News Reader

Comment by GianFabien | Hacker News Reader

On the internet the most marked issue is the difference between British English spellings (England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and the USA. It is frustrating that on most spell checked text boxes words like: harbour, labour, actualise, etc shown as misspelt.

I find it most irksome that the Australian Labor Party has chosen the USA spelling in spite of being part of the Commonwealth.

View on HN

The great thing about using Singapore as my locale is that it accepts pretty much any English spelling you throw at it, British or American. You see quite a mix of both on signs and documents here, too.

After enough programming over the years, I feel like my mind has separated the concept of a colour (which I learned as a child) and `Color` data.

me too: 'dialog' is a computer popup; 'dialogue' is a verbal exchange

For me (Brit), ‘program’ is some software and ‘programme’ is a collection of projects, in the project management sense

It gets worse. Canadian is different to both British and American (or it has some of each) and Australian is different again from all three.

Did you mean misspelled

> As a result of these circumstances, things like spelling practices varied from one place to another, and one scribe to another. The same word could even be written on the same page in multiple ways.

I believe we can all still be confident scribes and maybe even have our own preferred way of writing words, where we within reason push the boundaries or push our own viewpoints through self expression :D

"mispelt" is a somewhat archaic British spelling. "mispelled" is more modern.

No it isn't. -t instead of -ed in general for many words is dialectal for one thing, more commonly retained (a Saxonism) in the West Country than elsewhere. Misspelled in particular though is distinctly American, everywhere in Britain uses misspelt.

(Ironically, I'm not sure if deliberately ironically, you 'mispelt' both, fwiw.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com