On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 18:51 +0800, James Devenish wrote: > Hi, > > I don't use Microsoft Word much, but naturally I support users who do. I > have the computers set up with the default language as "English (AUS)" > because I presumed that was the right thing to do. However, I recently > used Word and found that it misspells "organisation" as "organization". > I was able to overcome this problem by setting the language to "English > (UK)". I'm flabbergasted that it could be wrong like this. It seems to > be a problem in both Word v.X and Word 2004. I guess my users are just > ignoring these errors. However, it makes me wonder what everyone else > does. Do you leave it as "AUS" and just ignore the errors, or do you set > it to "UK"? I'm not sure of the differences between Word's AUS and UK > spellings, except that they seem to be basically back-to-front in this > case.
The Australian dictionary compiled for OpenOffice.org suffers from the same problem. I think the aspell and ispell dictionaries do too. It is perhaps most strongly evidenced by the acceptance of both color and colour in writing. I've ended up having to replace the en_AU dictionaries on the journalists' systems here with the en_GB ones. I then provided them with a short custom dictionary compiled by our subeditors, and that's taken care of the issue. Like you, I think it's a sad state of affairs. We've never had a nutcase re-write our spelling ;-) and I sincerely hope it's not permitted to happen by proxy. -- Craig Ringer
