I’ve noticed that there is some confusion regarding the ‘correct’ spelling of words like ‘recognize/recognise’ and ‘organize/organise’. Some people seem to think that ‘ize’ is an Americanism, and ‘ise’ should be used on this side of the Atlantic.
In fact, while ‘ize’ is invariably used in the USA, both alternatives are acceptable in the UK and Ireland. The dictionaries vary in which they favour – Chambers prefers ‘ise’ while Oxford dictionaries prefer ‘ize’ – but all accept the validity of both. The Times traditionally used ‘ize’ but changed to ‘ise’ around 20 years ago. Some publishers insist on one or the other as their ‘house style’; others accept either provided it is used consistently.
Note that there are exceptions: for example, ‘advertise’ is always the correct spelling. If in doubt, consult a dictionary. Personally I always use ‘ize’ spellings, mainly because H. W. Fowler, author of Modern English Usage, prefers them – he justifies this in terms of the Greek roots of the words.
To complicate matters, ‘analyse’ is the correct spelling here, and ‘analyze’ in the USA.
Boadicea's Chariot 
Thanks Brendano. Interesting.
i suppose it is what you get used to as well. I favour the ise endings. They seem more consistent with advise and practise as well.
But i shall now be at more of a loss when completing crosswords… See you later.
Thanks, Isobel. Just something I posted on MyT before, prompted by something you said the other night. It’s a matter of personal preference … in a published document the main thing is to be consistent.
I know that people sometimes think ‘why is he using American spellings?’
… or, more importantly, ‘why is he talking such crap?’ 🙂
Yes that was me Brendano! I put it on your post the other day. You promised to do another enlightening me and I see you are a man of your word.
Booked my tix for Belfast in the summer so i’ll be back around Lough Neagh in a few months. 🙂
Now now Mr O, time to move on. You don’t want to attract the sort of negativity that type of comment provokes.
I think I’ll try to post some of my pix from last year at my cousin’s on my page today or tomorrow. Looking at them will be good for my soul. They may even entice you to comment on my page!!
Hi Brendano; interesting blog. I was always taught the conventional rule, as you say, that the ‘ise’ suffix is used by English speakers and the ‘ize’ by American speakers of English. Is it derived from the differences in pronunciation, I wonder?
But I suppose one get a little too prescriptive about this sort of thing. This is what I love about the English language; its capacity to change and absorb all these variants, without its beauty or richness ever being diminished.
I’ll shut up now! 😉
“Here” is Australia.
Consult the Macquarie Dictionary for correctness on DNMT. 🙂
Sorry, Isobel … I must comment on your page. 🙂 Glad to hear that you’re coming to Ireland again … look forward to seeing the pics. I flew over Loug Naegh a few months ago … it’s awfully big.
No, Claire … please don’t. 🙂 I can’t see a difference in pronunciation. 😦
I agree that one shouldn’t be too prescriptive, but one has to be presciptive to some degree, otherwise there would be no such thing as bad Engliah and words would lose their meanings.
Love the comment about Lough Neagh ‘it’s awfully big’! Yes, isn’t it just.
And sometimes spellings help us to see the historical origins of words, which, for those anoraks among us, is splendidly interesting. Though I also like the way that before the printing press was invented, spellings were far more fluid and Shakespeare is said to have spelled his name at least four different ways. So today I think I’ll be Ysobel. You’ll be the only ones to know it tho’!
Brendano; I just did a comment and it disappeared; ah well. Apologies if you get two versions..
I think that English is changing at an incredible pace these days, what with emails, blogging, text speak, immigration, Twitter…so it could be argued that Standard English, as an indelible set of hard and fast rules, is more necessary than ever.
On the other hand, they say Shakespeare wrote his name in lots of different ways and added hundreds of new words and phrases to our language.
So I guess one man’s sloppiness is another’s creative genius… 😉
Thanks, Ysabelle and Klayr. Yes, I know that Christopher Marlowe was also Marley and other variants, for example. In Ireland there’s the complication that another language entirely was spoken (and adopted by the English settlers, hence almost nothing in mediaeval Hiberno-English survives … the settlers/invaders mainly spoke Irish).
Names like O’Brien originally started with ‘Ua’, meaning ‘grandson of’. The apostrophe is a meaningless artefact of Anglicization (it does not stand for a missing ‘f’, as some people seem to think).
Anyway, I must do a post or two on Hiberno-Engish, seeing as there’s a bit of interest in language here. Thanks for the comments.
BreandánUa
Bearsy, sorry … I didn’t see your comment. Must check out the MD. 🙂
Thanks Brendano, I’ve always been conscious of the ize or ise.
I’ve always tended to use the ‘ise’ and have the machine ‘correct’ me.
How about an instruction on commas, semi-colons, and colons. ‘Cause I’m completely lost on those.
No rush!
😉
OK, Soutie … I’ll see what I can do. 🙂
Watched a bit of Western Force v. Bulls earlier … it looked a good match. Steyn had just scored when I left; don’t know how it finished.
For the closet philologists here, the original form (Greek) was -ize. So it’s the English form which has strayed (this time).
Ha ha
So you’re going to take up the challenge, please keep it simple!
The Bulls walked it, stamina, 80 minutes, a great squad, Morne Steyn missed 3 kicks!
Which reminds me, when the Cavaliers toured here in ’86
(I went to every test) Naas Botha hit the post , I think 5 times, he said later that he wasn’t even aiming for the post!
I was at Ellis Park when the Cavaliers (who had refused to do the Haka during the whole tour) did the Haka, the respect that they earned that day with me and my mates is unexplainable.
Janus … my point is that the ‘straying’ is partly perception. And I did mention the philology. 🙂
Soutie, I thought that might have happened … the Bulls have an awful lot of Boks.
Hiatus here till the Heineken Cup QFs in two weeks.
Thanks Brendano: I do enjoy these sort of discussions. I cannot remember any of the “rules”, but I suppose I must have learnt them at some point. I think I’m forgetting most of them though!
Janus; thanks for that; I hadn’t realised the Greek lineage here. Is ‘ise’ an Anglo Saxon suffix, or does it originate from somewhere else?
Thanks for this. The bit about the Times was interesting. I stick with what I learnt – ise.
When I was working for the Education Department here they insisted that one had to use the first entry in the MacQuarie Dictionary. That was fine until I came to the plural of Appendix – there was no way on earth that I was ever going to write Appendixes. 🙂
My surname, which is French, from huguenot ancestors, has been anglicised both in pronunciation and spelling. From family records you can see that right up to the mid nineteenth century close family members chose different spellings.
Interesting Isobel. Half of my great-grandmother’s children were registered in the mid-19th C with an ‘e’ in the name, and the other half had the ‘e’ omitted.
Well there you are. For obvious reasons I am not revealing my name here! I’m sure you’ve also found when using the IGI that people’s names were spelled differently at times in official registers because the clerk or official who wrote them down didn’t check the spelling
Ah Isobel… my maiden name is very conspicuously German, but my grandparents anglicised the pronunciation in war time Liverpool. I know nothing of my German ancestry because of the Don’t Mention the War attitude which prevails in my family to this day.
Oddly, they kept the German spelling though. So my GErman teacher very kindly informed everyone that my name could be interpreted as ‘big head’ when I was at school. Cue lots of piss taking; I couldn’t wait to Get Rid…
Then I went and married a French man!
Great great grandfather.
An illiterate ploughman working at Hill of Tarvit in Fife when he got married (or, more likely, had to get married).
Marriage certificate says ‘William Dalrumpall, his mark’ under his cross. Whoever was recording it was obviously a wee thing shaky on spelling himself and just made a stab at a name that is usually spelled ‘Dalrymple’ these days.
Said recorder was probably Welsh, when I think about it.
Thanks for the comments. Here, there are still sometimes variant spellings of surnames within families … for example, Bough/Baugh is a common surname in my area, and members of the same family may favour one or the other. Standardization is resisted by the rather mercurial Irish spirit. 🙂
I prefer ‘z’ spellings on account of good ol’ Fowler and also because they seem more elegant to me. And better for Scrabble. 🙂
Boadicea, all my standard dictionaries give both ‘appendixes’ and ‘appendices’ … Chambers prefers the former and Oxford and Collins the latter. But the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors gives only ‘appendices’.
Another slightly tricky plural is that of ‘index’ … the usage I apply is ‘indices’ in mathematical contexts; otherwise ‘indexes’.
Claire I unkindly giggled at that one. I also have a German part to my family who changed their spelling during the First World War after my great uncle was taunted by a master at his school, despite having an elder brother serving in the trenches in the British army.
My mother, to help people get the spelling right of our surname, which she had not grown up with, used to tell them another word it rhymed with, which gave a more than helping hand to our nicknames at school.
John why Welsh?
Welsh/Walsh is a common surname here, John. 🙂 Sometimes one notices that spellings of Irish names in Australia, for example, are survivals of forms that died out here.
And sometimes handwriting has a part to play. Ronald Reagan’s ancestry was traced to a Tipperary hamlet, but the name on the register looked more like ‘Ryan’ (a common Tipperary name) than the alleged ‘Regan’. Still, Ronnie acquired the Irish ancestry he needed.
You old cynic Brendanua!
Ach, well, I’m used to it! My dad is a bit more open minded on the German thing. Apparently, some distant ancestor of ours was held as a prisoner of war for some time in 1916 after a failed Zeppelin raid on London. We never delved any further, so that’s all we know about the Dodgy Family Name…
Hi, Claire
Ach?
This German thing obviously takes a while to work itself out of the system!
Not a problem, of course. And DFN’s of Hunnish origin not a problem either, given that I am a loyal subject of the Royal Family Windsor, formerly known as Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha.
John Mackie: you make me laugh! I suppose we’ve all got dodgy ancestors from one time or another; that’s my absurdly relativist way of looking at the thing!
I find Scottish names and accents lovely, though. You can be proud of a name like yours, you lucky thing… 😉
It amuses me no end when people get uppity about their surname being ‘Smyth’ and not ‘Smith’. They are both derived from the fact that someone some long time back was a smith.
As John rightly says it was the clerk who filled in the registers who had to take a stab at the spelling. Imagine some poor soul in London trying to decipher what a Geordie bridegroom was saying or someone from Devon…
Isobel, good evening
In re Welsh/Walsh inability to spell.
I refer you to my previous answer on my own blog.
I still believe that p-Celts are suspect when it comes to English orthography [colloquial usage to preempt any pedants hereanent (good Scotch word)].
Haw, algebraic brackets in writing. Never done that before!.
Moving on, I personally blame Janh1 for my belief. I could, of course, be wrong.
Bloody spell checker not happy about ‘preempt’. Bloody spell checker wrong, in my opinion.
Ah John. silly me. But good to see you. Recommended your page to a friend. Will I get a share of the royalties when you are Discovered? Or just a passing ref on Desert Island Discs?
But I think I asked you somewhere – here? my page? there?- about Scottish, and Scots. Now you write Scotch like Samuel Johnson. It’s just a Caledonian ruse to confuse I suspect.
Your last sentence a version of Charles Causley’s Jolly Hunter?
Episode 5?
Please tell Mrs john that I have bought the HM novel about the French Revolution. Will report back when I read it. I may need help with the Indie xw later.
I’m glad both is correct. 🙂
… both are correct. 🙂
Of course, phonetically ‘z’ is correct. That’s the sound we all make.
But who gives a tinker’s cuss? I’ll stick with ‘ise’, and since that’s preferred in Australia, I’m home and dry.