Spellchecking US words

[Victorious56]

I have just discovered the Edit Book feature, thank you for this, it's very good

I would like to use the spellchecker to amend US spellings to their British counterparts. I have set the dictionary to English-UK, and words like centre, colour etc are flagged up as I would expect. However, words like realize, memorize etc are not. Am I missing something somewhere?

Thanks.

[kovidgoyal]

It depends on the dictionary. calibre's dictionaries come from openoffice. I am guessing that realize is correct as per that dictionary. For example see this wikipedia page onw ords ending with -ize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling

[Victorious56]

Thanks for the speedy reply; I was wondering if it was something like that. Is it possible to adjust my version of the dictionary so that the 'ise' endings are seen as the 'correct' ones?

Thanks for the link, I hadn't realised (realized!) it wasn't so clear-cut.

[kovidgoyal]

You cannot directly edit the dictionary. However calibre supports the openoffice oxt format for dictionaries. A bit of googling should find you different versions of such english dictionaries, perhaps one will suit your tastes, if not, you will need to research how to create dictionaries in the oxt format.

[mrmikel]

It is possible to create user dictionaries and make them active as one wishes. If you spellcheck a few times and add these words to the user dictionary, you will be able to make these words not show up as errors.

As Kovid noted, it is possible to fiddle around with dictionaries, as has been noted in other posts on this forum. It isn't particularly easy and it means that it will displace the regular dictionary as you can only have one dictionary associated with a language as I understand it.

I edit a number of British-American works, so I understand your concerns.

[AnotherCat]

Originally Posted by Victorious56

...Thanks for the link, I hadn't realised (realized!) it wasn't so clear-cut.

Nor for memorize.

If you have an interest you may like to try and find a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary (the big multivolume one which is the touchstone) in a library and look at the etymology and quotations for the Oxford spellings of such words. You can also do online searches of the OED at www.oed.com which will also give the etymology and quotations.

It is not as simple as blaming it all on the Americans who seem actually to have had very little to do with it at all.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Victorious56

Thanks for the speedy reply; I was wondering if it was something like that. Is it possible to adjust my version of the dictionary so that the 'ise' endings are seen as the 'correct' ones?

Thanks for the link, I hadn't realised (realized!) it wasn't so clear-cut.

@Victorious56 - Here's another one http://www.tysto.com/uk-us-spelling-list.html

There's a recently added feature to enable the importation of word lists into the editors user dictionaries - so I grabbed the tysto page and made a couple of lists - see attached zip.

There are dictionaries at the Apache Open Office site, which IMO are better than those from the Libre Office site - http://extensions.openoffice.org/en/...che-openoffice They're bigger and they have South African and Australian variants.

BR

[Victorious56]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

You cannot directly edit the dictionary. However calibre supports the openoffice oxt format for dictionaries. A bit of googling should find you different versions of such english dictionaries, perhaps one will suit your tastes, if not, you will need to research how to create dictionaries in the oxt format.

Thanks Kovid, I will have a look into this.

Originally Posted by AnotherCat

It is not as simple as blaming it all on the Americans who seem actually to have had very little to do with it at all.

You’re right, it looks like the French have to put their hands up for this one

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@Victorious56 - Here's another one http://www.tysto.com/uk-us-spelling-list.html

There's a recently added feature to enable the importation of word lists into the editors user dictionaries - so I grabbed the tysto page and made a couple of lists - see attached zip.

There are dictionaries at the Apache Open Office site, which IMO are better than those from the Libre Office site - http://extensions.openoffice.org/en/...che-openoffice They're bigger and they have South African and Australian variants.

BR

Thanks for the file - there’s a bazillion of these blighters

I can see from some of your posts in another thread that you’ve been wrestling with this a bit. I have been looking at it this morning and I thought I had created an edited dictionary which I then asked calibre to use for its spellings, but the ‘ize’ words were still getting through so I obviously haven’t got it right yet.