Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Well, my wife is from Scotland and she has also lived in Englad and Germany as well. I asked her about this and she said that "forty millions" and "practising" were incorrect. The rest just look wrong because there doesn't seem to be a good way to handle a Boston accent in print. I would have just not bothered to be honest since it just looks like errant hyphens left in by mistake.
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"Forty millions" is somewhat archaic, but not terribly unusual British English.
"Practising" is perfectly correct British English. We have "practise" as a verb, but "practice" as a noun, unlike American English which uses "practice" for both. Thus, we would say "the doctor is practising in his medical practice". "Practicing" is incorrect - but frequently used by poor spellers - in the UK.
Before about the late 19th century, "to-day", "to-morrow", "to-night", etc, were the standard spellings. The hyphen was dropped relatively recently. One occasionally still comes across these word hypenated in the UK and it's not regarded as incorrect.