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English
3. UK.dic accepts both -ize and -ise versions of words like "maximize";
this is indeed correct for British English, but in any single work,
a consistent spelling must be used; hence one must decide for one or
the other and the spell checker should be switchable accordingly.
There are five categories of words in English with spelling variants; the
differences are often referred to as US or UK, but as the table below
illustrates, this is not so clear cut.
This shows that we could agree on labelled, center, maximize, and only
need to quarrel about color/colour and analyze/analyse. (This is my own personal
style,
where I settle for "colour" and "analyse".)
(Consider the origin of this word. The Latin is "color, coloris", so that
"color" is indeed the true original word. The English "colour" comes from the
French "couleur". The same applies to "honour/honor". More interesting is
"neighbour/neighbor" which is not a Latin root at all, but a Germanic one. It
is related to the German "Nachbar" (literally "the one beside" but which
translates exactly as "neighbour". So why is the "u" there at all? English is
weird!)
My solution: 11 files
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I have taken UK.dic and US.dic, merged them, extracted the words in the
four categories, placing them 8 additional dictionary files.
eng_com.dic (150843 words with no alternative spellings)
colour.dic and color.dic (366 words with -our/-or variant)
labelled.dic and labeled.dic (326 words with -ell-/-el- variant)
centre.dic and center.dic (85 words with -re/-er variant)
ize.dic and ise.dic (3387 words with -ize/-ise variant)
yze.dic and yse.dic (87 words with -yze/-yse variant)
Six of these files must be loaded each time: eng_com.dic and one of
each pair. One uses the WinEdt dictionary manager to activate as one
pleases. Alternatively, one could use them to make up one big
dictionary of the combination that one desires. I do provide ready-to-run
installations, see below.
I set up WinEdt (32 bit version with modes and submodes) with submodes
UK and US, to append to main modes TeX and ANSI. My default is liberal
British, but strict British and strict American are optionally there.
The filters for the 11 dictionaries are thus:
In fact, my situation is more complex because I also have submodes DE and NEU
for German texts, old and new spelling rules.
WARNING: these macros will load the standard set of modes with :US and :UK
added as submodes. If you have any customize modes of your own, do not do
this. Rather, add the submodes by hand and then load the appropriate
eng_*.dat file under Options|Dictionaries Right mouse button Load from...
Patrick W Daly
Max-Planck Institut fuer Aeronomie
37191 Katlenburg-Lindau
Germany
daly@linmpi.mpg.de
2000 March 3