British English: Encyclopedia II - British English - -ise versus -ize

British English - -ise versus -ize

Words of the sort organize/organise and their derivatives can be spelt with either s or z in British English. The -ize forms are promoted by the Oxford English Dictionary. British English with -ize is sometimes known as OED spelling, and may be marked by the registered IANA language tag 'en-GB-oed'. It is the spelling used by the Encyclopædia Britannica, by the United Nations, and by many international organizations and academic publications. The -ize forms were used by The Times until the mid-1980s. The -ise forms are used by the British government and taught in the British school systems. They are far more prevalent in common usage. Pam Peters (2004, -ize/-ise) relates that British National Corpus data indicates the ratio of popularity for -ise forms to -ize forms in Britain is 3:2.

Words like advertise, advise, arise, compromise, disguise, despise, enterprise, exercise, merchandise, revise, supervise, surprise are always correctly spelled with the -ise ending in both systems.[1]

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "-ise versus -ize", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki