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This is a list of British English words that have different American English spellings, for example, colour (British English) and color (American English). Word pairs are listed with the British English version first, in italics, followed by the American English version: spelt, spelled; Derived words often, but not always, follow their root.
This is a set of lists of English personal and place names having spellings that are counterintuitive to their pronunciation because the spelling does not accord with conventional pronunciation associations. Many of these are degenerations in the pronunciation of names that originated in other languages.
For the second portion of the list, see List of words having different meanings in American and British English: M–Z. Asterisked (*) meanings, though found chiefly in the specified region, also have some currency in the other region; other definitions may be recognised by the other as Briticisms or Americanisms respectively.
The following list, of about 350 words, is based on documented lists [4] [10] of the top 100, 200, or 400 [3] most commonly misspelled words in all variants of the English language, rather than listing every conceivable misspelled word. Some words are followed by examples of misspellings:
[41] This is a reverse of the typical rule, where British spelling uses the ae/oe and American spelling simply uses e. Words that can be spelled either way in British English include chamaeleon, encyclopaedia, homoeopathy, mediaeval (a minor variant in both AmE and BrE [42] [43] [44]), foetid and foetus.
Homographs are words with the same spelling but having more than one meaning. Homographs may be pronounced the same ( homophones ), or they may be pronounced differently ( heteronyms , also known as heterophones).
English had also borrowed large numbers of words from French, and kept their French spellings. The spelling of Middle English is very irregular and inconsistent, with the same word being spelled in different ways, sometimes even in the same sentence. However, these were generally much better guides to the then-pronunciation than modern English ...
Inventive spelling (sometimes invented spelling) is the use of unconventional spellings of words.. Conventional written English is not phonetic (that is, it is not written as it sounds, due to the history of its spelling, which led to outdated, unintuitive, misleading or arbitrary spelling conventions and spellings of individual words) unlike, for example, German or Spanish, where letters have ...