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.
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.
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".
In mainstream usage that's true, but scientific usage leans more to the OED spelling, especially since some major journals (even UK-based ones like Nature) enforce it.
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.
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.
Dictionaries are still quite useful, especially to someone for whom English is not a first language. It's especially useful for looking up the meaning of some word, for which the meaning is not completely obvious in use.
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.
