The other day I went to a website where I saw what I thought was a "misspelling". They had spelled the word "Organisations" and I was like, hmmm, that's not right. I emailed them pointing out that this appeared to be wrong. (as the rest of the site appeared to be in "American English") The site owner wrote back and said that that was the English version on that spelling. He then proceeded to say that "most of the rest of the world" spells it that way. (Organisations vs Organizations)
Feeling horribly stupid I did a Google search for it. True enough, it looks like they spell it like that in the UK... HOWEVER, there were some 72 million hits for "Organisations" while there were 211 million hits for "Organizations". And the wikipedia article is spelled with a Z. Which leads me to believe that "Most of the rest of the world" happens to be a small island in the Atlantic.
I find this funny because I hear about the "Ignorant Americans" all the time. In this case however I think I'm not crazy for having never seen that spelling before. And "most of the rest of the world" doesn't spell it that way.
(Am I wrong to think it was misspelled if they spell "color" right and other things with "American English" and they just happen to spell "Organisation" in the UK fashion?)
~B.
I'd say you're right about the inconsistent spellings.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I'd say that a Google search isn't necessarily the best gauge for "the rest of the world" since a huge percentage of the web is American.
In this case I'd still say you're right. :)
Yea I vote for you in the sense that if the rest of their site uses American spellings, it doesn't make sense to spell one word non-american.
ReplyDeleteI would also say most of Europe spells it organisations, since most of europe uses british spellings as their english is obviously more influenced by britain than america. I wonder if Canada uses the s... but Joel thinks Australia probably uses both interchangeably.
Most English speaking countries probably use an s.
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ReplyDeleteIt does seem a little odd to pick & choose.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I'm with Erik on the Google stats; I bet the number of American-based websites would skew such a search.