John Dekker's Day

1:21PM - More English than the English...

A couple of days ago I talked about the "Skeptic's Annotated Bible", and jml replied using the word sceptic. Which spelling is correct?

Similarly, when I asked the question Should we evangelise our kids?, one anonymous correspondent asked why I was spelling it "evangelise" rather than "evangelize". Now, Ursus, who knows about these things, mentioned that "the ending ~ise is used for Latin derived words, and ~ize is used for Greek derived words," but many English words are derived from both languages. Generally ~ise endings are regarded as "English", while ~ize tends to be American.

Anyway, with Google we can determine how words are spelled in different countries, though this is not to be confused with which spelling is actually correct. Consider the occurrences of "skeptic" and "sceptic":

	Skeptic	Sceptic
World	7.51 million	1.57 million
Australia	41,900	35,600
Canada	184,000	35,500
UK	225,000	208,000
New Zealand	11,200	600

All have a predominance of "skeptic" (though one gets the impression that no-one is sure how to spell it) but in Australia and the UK it is only slighter higher, while in Canada and NZ it has a significant majority. With evangelize / evangelise, however, we get different results:

	Evangelize	Evangelise
World	1.4 million	184,000
Australia	800	14,500
Canada	46,000	1400
UK	21,000	53,000
New Zealand	500	1000

So here, the ratio of "s" to "z" is 2:1 in NZ, 2·5:1 in the UK, and 18:1 in Australia. On this one, we're more English than the English.