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Comment by lost_name | Hacker News Reader

It seems it's more nuanced. Try the following searches:

  how long does it take to caramelize onions
  how long does it take to caramelise onions (note the typo)
  how long to caramelize an onion (not a typo but still wrong)
  how long to caramelize onions

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Replacing the 'z' with 's' is not a typo, though.

Several years ago, a coworker pointed out that an article spelled "organization" with an "s" instead of a "z" and wondered why such an obvious mistake would pass an editor.

I pointed out that that's just the British spelling. Everyone in my group was amazed that I would know such a thing. It was an eye-opening moment... for me.

There's a very old and very well established anecdote of this. It's the difference between the words "color" and colour".

- You show an American the word "colour" and they go: aha, a typo!

- You show a Brit the word "color" and they go aha, an American!

... an American. Or maybe a Roman citizen (Latin: color). Or a Pole: (Polish: kolor). Italian? (colore) Spanish? (color).

Most languages with a cognate for the Latin word color do not have this gratuitous Old French "ou" in its orthography. Good riddance.

Yes Australian here. I run into this problem with programming languages all the time. Because of things like "colour" vs "color" or "centre" vs "center". "Maximise" "minimise" etc are good examples as well

My coworkers and I call it the 'American API' problem.

Places I've worked - in Australia and NZ - have adopted American spelling throughout the code in an effort to standardise with tools, APIs, etc.

That is, "Use American spelling wherever possible in the code" is part of the coding standard.

My mom has a British/Indian accent but I've never even been there: there are a lot of less common words that I didn't even realize I said differently until I was too old to feel like intentionally changing it: rather with an 'ah', calcium with a 'sh', occasionally unconsciously spelling things "theatre" or "centre" or "harbour" (I guess a good chunk of the books I read growing up were from British publishers? I don't really know). I don't know why but I always managed to be surprised by how shocked people's reaction is to these pronunciations and spellings, especially because I've spent my whole life in California surrounded by immigrants (I'd say the percentage of friends I've had with parents born in America is in the very low double digits).

It isn't exactly "the" British spelling -- it's actually "a" British spelling. That is, the "z" form is not only correct British usage, it's actually quite a bit older [0].

[0] http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/03/ize-or-ise/

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