UK to US Spelling

Many people struggle when they need to write using a country’s spelling that isn’t their native tongue. After several years of looking up the differences, I now know most of them by heart. However, there are still a few that can catch me out. I thought I’d build up a translation table so I didn’t have to keep searching to check if I was right. I thought this might be useful to my readers, so here is a searchable table of the most common variances.

When moving from British to American English, there are some general rules that normally apply;

For words that have ‘ise’ use ‘ize’
For words that have ‘our’ use ‘or’
For words that have a double ‘ll’ in the middle, use one ‘l’
For words that end in ‘re’ use ‘er’

You can either look through the 300 odd variations, or you can search for the one you want. Typing a few letters in the search box will bring up everything that matches. You can search for either the UK or US spelling.

In most cases, I’ve only included the root of the word. For example, I’ve included ‘stabilise, stabilize’ but not its variations, e.g. stabilization, stabilized, etc.

(There are over 300 entries, so if your connection is slow, it may take a while to load.)

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