
-ize or -ise? : Oxford Dictionaries Online - joshuacc
http://oxforddictionaries.com/page/izeise
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Jun8
You may think this is a triviality, but it created a minor headache for me in
my PhD research. I was working on video summarization and had searched for
papers using variants of that term. Then, I found some important articles were
missed in my paper collection. Turns out Google is not clever enough to
standardize the two spellings into one.

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pinko
I just checked, and Google gets it wrong even when you prepend a tilde! I.e.,
~organise does not find organize. That really surprises me.

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robin_reala
This is somewhat an OEDism; no other mainstream (British) English dictionaries
state this as far as I can recall.

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Gelada
It might be unique to the OED, but they do have historical evidence to back up
their case.

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robin_reala
I understand etymology has to use history to present a case, but I don’t know
a single BrE speaking person that’d write a current text with -ize endings.
The OED aren’t prescribing current usage with their stance.

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Gelada
As a BrE speaker, I do use "ise", but "ize" is not unknown, especially in
science (I believe that the British published journal Nature has it as their
house style). Recently I think it has been declining as it has been identified
as "the american version".

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Ruudjah
Dictionaries are an artifact of an elitist society where only a small part was
lettered. Language is a living thing, just like computer languages are. Oxford
dictionary included internet terms like lol and imho, to reflect the current
status in language used by a great part of the english speaking world.

The notion of an 'official' dictionary is rather strange. We use certain
words, but we can only include them if an institute blesses these words.
Having a dictionary is not a bad thing; it serves as a guide to know what
language others may expect. The process of having an institute decide for us
what's the set of words we ought to use is merely ridiculous. The alternative
is this: generate a dictionary from all webpages utilizing the english
language. We can do this every -say 5- years, which then will serve as a
dictionary for the next 5 years.

The language speakers and writers should decide what the contents of the
dictionary should be, not some elitist club of people calling themselves
'language experts'. We, the people are the language experts, not them.

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Gelada
The benefit of language experts and pedants has been to slow the rate of
change in language. As a result we can read Shakespeare and other historical
work in the original. It could be argued that this is itself an elitest point,
especially about Shakespeare; however the ability to access the past without
special training means that historical knowledge is not restricted to the
elite.

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dodo53
It's funny that in other news they're getting flack for including LOL and OMG
and their defence is that they're descriptive not prescriptive - and I think
most brits would use *-ise indiscriminately.

