What Dictionary Are You Using?

I saw a post recently by someone online who was discussing the differences in the meaning and spelling of a particular word – one of the variations had an ‘e’ on the end.

They were saying the two words had two different meanings and I would have loved to leave a comment but the blog in question was closed to comments.

I looked up the word in question and found that the word, both with an ‘e’ and without still had the same meaning – it just depended on which dictionary you checked and also which version of English spelling you were using.

When checking on spellings for client documents it’s probably a good idea to check to see which version of English they are using and then stick with that version and make sure that spellings apply accordingly.

I had a new VA contact me the other week advising me I had spelt a number of words incorrectly in one of my ebooks but when I asked which words they were it turned out it was exactly this same thing that had come into play. Hence the reason why I use an ‘s’ instead of ‘z’ in some words and some words end in ‘our’ instead of ‘or’. There are other variations as well, not to mention meanings sometimes (thong is a good example of what I mean but that’s another story! 🙂 )

I know it can get confusing.

A tip for you: When typing in Word for a client, if you know they use a different version of English, then change the dictionary you’re using for checking to their dictionary and Word will pick up the incorrect spellings for you and leave the correct ones alone.