Rules for contributions to the talk page please read before contributing This article is about English spelling differences and their history Please remember the following before contributing If you are interested in the topics Britain is better than America or America is better than Britain or Australia is better than Britain and America you are on the wrong page Please click on the preceding links to go to the correct page Saying that you have never heard of an expression is not permitted on this page as it contributes nothing to a debate Many infer from their fluency in English that they are experts in English Mostly this is not the case That an individual has not heard of an expression is unlikely to be a compelling argument that it does not exist So please always provide sources for any contentious views Center vs Centre Usually center in commonwealth English is used to mean the middle of something i e The center of the circle is denoted by O Usually centre in commonwealth English used to mean a place that is used for one activity i e We went to the recreation centre IMO this should be mentioned somewhere in the article Re Latinisation Some of the changes in American spelling were largely phonemic while others involved the restoration of etymologically correct Latin or Greek spellings often to words which English had borrowed from French or indirectly Greek color center Gk Fr couleur centre dialogue British English colour centre dialogue I took out the centre center example because I think it is not an illustration of the point the author is trying to make If I m not totally off then the etymology is L centrum Fr centre by degradation of final syllables E centre taking over the written form pronunciation then diverges between E Fr center Websterised I can t see how center should be any closer to centrum than centre is BTW I think the whole argument is spurious it seems to me that Webster did not try to make spelling closer to Latin Greek but rather tried to simplify it dialogue became dialog not because of anything Greek but because the ue is silent There should be a justification for the etymology claim or it should be removed About the spelling differences of ize ise I am a bit confused by the first sentence Looking in other sources on the net it seems like it should say British English in the first word But I have English as a second language why I let others make a statement Adam L The suggestion is often that Webster was responsible for changing spelling however the evidence actually points to the contrary If you look at many 17th 18th Century British works you will see many American spellings such as center theater harbor honor and favor amongst others The dictionaries by Blount Glossographia 1661 and Cockeram English dictionarie 1647 contain each of these Also the ize spellings are the only ones listed which is still the case in British pocket dictionaries ize is also the favoured spelling of many British book publishers such as Oxford University Press Penguin and Pan Macmillan to name a few The real changes to British spelling came in the mid 18th Century with Johnson s francophillic tendencies for changing spellings to keep in fashion with the other side of the English channel Many people also seem to forget that a number of US spellings have already been accepted in the UK jail instead of gaol siren instead of syren alarm instead of alarum cider instead of cyder burden instead of burthen advertise instead of advertize and baritone instead of barytone to name a few Rick P I m not sure what the right forum is for raising such issue but I think that the discussion of og ogue misses some of the nuance of how the two forms are used in American English In my experience educated writers of American English use the term analogue when writing about something that is analogous to another thing but use the term analog as a converse of digital analog watch analog circuit Similarly the term dialogue is the correct term for verbal discourse while dialog is simply another term for dialog box the term did originate with dialogue but it has been said that Apple API engineers standardized on the og spelling because it would be easier on programmers with user documentation subsequently using the modified spelling Similarly the discussion of disc disk fails to mention the fac