alt Hacker NewsApparently it was acceptable to use s or z in words like catalyse or analyze in British English until Microsoft Word came out with a British English spellchecker that picked the s spelling as its standard. Whether this is just myth or fact seems to be a point of controversy.
Replies
gbil • last Tuesday at 5:27 PM
I learned British English starting in the 80s and using s whereas z was used in American English, together with tre instead of ter (eg. theatre), was a big difference. And I can tell you that MS Word back then was just not there so this sounds like an urban legend but let the British people in HN chime in.
gnufx • last Tuesday at 11:45 PM
No, see (even the new) Fowler's Modern English Usage. British usage is -yse, but right-and-proper Oxford spelling uses -ize, not -ise, for words with a Greek root.
Most academic and technical writing in the UK still uses the z form, and the OED and Collins dictionaries tend to prefer it, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling
In popular writing, the s forms dominate - I've not heard the MS Word explanation before, but the most popular UK-produced word processors and spellcheckers in the 1980s (eg. Locoscript/Locospell, Protext/Prospell, 1st Word) tended to come from companies in the Cambridge area or which were founded by Cambridge grads, so would naturally have used the s spellings by default.