In the 21st century, why learn by heart rote spelling when you can just type it into a computer and spellcheck?
This is a book about spelling, and I’m here to help you spell better, or at least in a more Canadian manner. But we live in the 21st century and we have certain tools at our disposal, most importantly the spellchecker. When writing, you don’t have to remember everyword and you don’t have to page through a printed dictionary; your computer can help you.
Or so you think. In truth, it won’t help you – not if you’re trying to write fluent Canadian English. Considerable experimentation and research has led me to conclude that not a single spellchecker in common use – very much including the one in Microsoft Word for Windows – gives correct advice when writing Canadian English. You can’t trust your computer.
Why doesn’t it work? It isn’t just because the software doesn’t have Canadian spellings in its dictionary. I have a name for the unreliability of spellcheckers for Canadian writers – the Coquitlam effect, by analogy to another phenomenon I’ll discuss shortly.
A word processor essentially turns you into a typesetter in a way that never happened with typewriters or with early word processors that were attached to dot-matrix or “letter-quality” printers. Unless you’ve had special training, word processing invites you to get a million little things wrong – and get a few very large things wrong, too. By default, word processors are complex; they will not prevent you from making mistakes.
“Default” is the operative word here. A default is a setting the program uses in the absence of your own decision. The first time you use a word processor, if you’re really attentive you’ll see a range of default settings. Somebody decided what your page size is, what your margins are, what font you’d like, and what colours to use (typically black on white).
But there are defaults you can’t see, and one of them is language. It’s true that some modern word processors use a status bar to indicate the language in use, but you aren’t looking there when you’re writing. In many other cases there simply is no indication of the language the computer thinks you’re using. Now, if you Google around for Web pages on this topic, you’ll find that most of them talk about the language of the interface (what language are the menus and dialogue boxes written in?) or the language of the document you’re writing. In the latter case, they’re mostly talking about something like French vs. English, or Arabic vs. Chinese.
If your operating system (your whole computer, in effect) works in English, then your word processor probably will, too – either because it automatically senses the operating-system setting or because you bought or downloaded a single-language version of the software. There’s a trend now for people who speak “minority” languages to run their computers in English, but use spellcheckers and other language tools in their own language. But those are advanced users who realize there’s a difference between the language of the word-processing interface and the language they want to write in.
For English-speakers, though, everything “just works” in English. Your whole computer operating system is English, your word processor is English, all the documents you write are English. Everything seems to be working as you expect (if you even thought about it enough to expect something in the first place), so the default use of English isn’t even visible to you.
But here’s the problem: Just as a speaker of, say, Welsh or Maltese can set up a program to spellcheck and hyphenate in those languages even if the rest of the interface is in English, you as an English-speaker can set the program to check your spelling using a certain variant of English. All your menus and other interface features might use U.S. English, but you can go ahead and write in, say, Canadian English.
For Microsoft Word for Windows Vista, there are 16 possible English variants, from Jamaica to South Africa and, yes, Canada. But what’s the default? For Canadian systems, it’s almost always U.S. English. (For U.K. systems, it’s U.K. English, but you probably aren’t using a U.K. system.)
This means the first time you use your word processor, you will almost certainly be writing in U.S. English as far as the software is concerned. That will also be true the next time you use the software, and the time after that, and every other time unless and until you go out of your way to permanently set the language of your text to Canadian English.
Have you done that? Probably not. I doubt it ever occurred to you. And it isn’t necessarily an easy thing to do. The setting might be buried in a preferences screen. Or bugs in the program might cause the language designation to spontaneously switch back to U.S. or U.K. English. Or you might change the language without realizing the change applies only to whatever you type after that point.
Or your software just won’t give you the option to change the dialect of English.
There’s another wrinkle: Your software may not use any specific nation’s English dialect. It may instead use “international English.” It’s an undefined, and usually meaningless, amalgam of dialects that’s intended to be innocuous but ends up infuriating anyone who actually uses a distinct English variant. The desktop-publishing software that used to massively dominate the industry, Quark Xpress, offers a so-called Canadian version that lets you spellcheck in “Canadian French” and “International English,” which does not exist.
All told, when you’re typing away in your software, that software may not know you’re using English at all. If it does, it probably assumes you want to write American. But if you’re reading this book, you don’t want to write American. The “errors” the software goes on to “correct” may not be errors at all. I’ve got proof.
That’s the result of my testing. No computer spellchecker in common use consistently permits Canadian spellings and flags other spellings as incorrect. In other words, none of the software tested will consistently steer you in the right direction. If you want to spell Canadian in all your writing, these spellcheckers are not going to help.
I didn’t test every spellchecker in existence, but my cohorts and I (see Acknowledgements) thoroughly investigated all the big ones:
All the above have explicit settings for Canadian English.
My cohorts and I also tested a few select software applications that check spelling in “English” without any national or other qualification. I intentionally limited my testing of such software, since by definition it doesn’t accommodate Canadian spelling. These programs are included here mostly for comparison.
I did not check Microsoft Word for Macintosh, as its English variants are limited to Australian, U.K. and U.S. Nor was Quark Xpress tested.
I wrote a corpus of over 200 sentences that use words with national spelling differences. Some of those words were actually phrases, like sponsorship program(me). Some others were known to be incorrect and were a test of overregularization (see below). The full list of test sentences is available online at en-CA.org/data; feel free to adapt and modify them, with attribution.
For software with national-dialect options, the full corpus was checked three times, with Canadian, U.S., and U.K. settings correctly enabled. For other software, the corpus was checked once. The following results relate to Canadian spellings only.
The only words that all spellcheckers noticed as errors in Canadian English were these: fiberglas and fibreglas. There: Two words. (This is the base list.)
Two more flagged words, budgetted and targetted, are debatable even in Canada. Another flagged set is wrong everywhere – unenforcable, dingey, cringeing, unchangeing, unhingeing, valourize.
There were two others, but they were ringers added to the list to check overregularizations. One was nacer – it’s actually spelled nacre and it means mother-of-pearl. Chancer (a misspelling of chancre as in “chancre sore”) has a rare British sense of that spelling that wasn’t being tested. Both those words were flagged as incorrect – which they are, but everywhere, not merely in Canada.
What about Microsoft? Most people don’t use Macs or open-source software or desktop publishing; most people just type away in Microsoft Word. You shouldn’t expect much help there, either. All Microsoft spellcheckers failed to catch the misspelled words in the base list plus the following Canadian misspellings, several of which are debatable uses of doubled consonants (marked with ‡):
Microsoft Word also flagged the following questionable cases as misspelled:
All software applications that let you select a national spelling variant were roughly equal in their numbers of false positives (software says it’s a misspelling when it isn’t; in truth, the word is spelled correctly) and false negatives (software says it is not a misspelling; in truth, the word is misspelled).
All applications of all kinds were almost equally likely to authorize the use of multiple national variants even if there is really only one option in Canadian English. For example, all applications tested let you write analysing, cosy, and artistic license in Canadian, but those words are actually spelled analyzing, cozy, and artistic licence. Even really obvious misspellings, like center (American), sail through the big applications, including Microsoft Word. They let you mix ’n’ match.
There is a modest trend toward permitting British spellings more often than American ones. Hence aeon (for eon), programme, and foetal and foetid sail through all tested software.
There weren’t a lot of abbreviations tested (only two), but not a single software application recognized the Canadian abbreviation Pte. for private (military rank). All applications marked Pte. incorrect in U.S. English, while InDesign marked Pt. incorrect in everything but U.S. – which is odd, since Pt. is an American abbreviation.
What about trickier, more contentious, or ambiguous cases – words with viable alternate spellings? I take a hardline approach here: If the Canadian Oxford lists the spelling as second or third in a list, then it isn’t correct. If a spelling is listed as any kind of variant (including “especially U.S.”), then it isn’t correct, either. Dictionaries are popularity contests: The first spelling listed is the right one.
And here is where spellcheckers are the most dangerous, as they permit nearly any kind of spelling variation – ax or axe, fulfilment or fulfillment, jewellery or jewelry. (Only one of each pair is correct in Canadian: axe, fulfillment, jewellery.)
If you accept that the Canadian spelling of fibre uses -re, your software will usually agree with you (all but InDesign and WordPerfect agree with the -re spelling). But what about fibre optic? Is that two words or one? The only spelling given a consistent pass by all spellcheckers is fiber optic – but only as a variant in the Canadian and British dictionaries. Every variant of fibre optic (-er or -re, one word or two, hyphen or no hyphen) gets a pass in one spellchecker or another.
Some words that even very adept spellers have to sit there and think about also tend to be given a pass. How do you spell maneuver? (That spelling there is just one of the options.)
In Canadian English, all of them are deemed correct, depending on the software you’re using. (In fact, the only spelling marked as a mistake across the board in U.S., U.K., and Canadian English is maneuvre. Every other variant is accepted or rejected, in unpredictable sequence, by spellcheckers, no matter what dialect you’ve selected.)
For the record, the Canadian Oxford spelling is manoeuvre, which implies that odd-looking verb forms like manoeuvring are also correct. (Manoeuvrability is explicitly listed as a correct spelling by Oxford.)
If you can’t rely on your computer to help you write Canadian English correctly, what’s going to happen?
There’s a well-known phenomenon in the casual linguistics research that is published on blogs. (It’s only “casual” because it isn’t peer-reviewed and because the topics, like some other bloggable topics, are too small to warrant a full scientific paper. Nonetheless, many of the writers of such blogs have Ph.D.s in linguistics and their work is credible.) The Cupertino effect refers to a false correction put in place by a spellchecker. It has that name because one specific misspelling of cooperation, “cooperatino,” was flagged as a misspelling in early versions of Microsoft Word for Windows. In another manifestation, cooperation was flagged as an error, while co-operation would not be.
One of the available replacement words was Cupertino, the name of the city in California where Apple (“Computer”) Inc. is headquartered. If you weren’t paying attention, you could approve the correction of “cooperatino” into “Cupertino.” If you really weren’t paying attention, you could approve the correction of all instances of “cooperatino” into “Cupertino.”
Thus the Cupertino effect: If you mistakenly allow a spellchecker to replace a word with the wrong word, your document may be strewn with incomprehensible pellets of non-meaning.
But at least you’d notice the mistake if you read the document. Actually, any English-speaker would notice the mistake. This phenomenon is not quite like the tendency of spellcheckers to leave incorrect words in a document because they happen to be correctly spelled in another context. (I have trouble with writing ratio as ration. A spellchecker won’t catch that for me. Ditto another real example of mine, outweight when I meant outweigh.) Those are actually quite hard to spot, particularly when you’re double-checking your own copy. Still, “Cupertino” in the middle of a sentence would probably jump out at you.
But spellcheckers do not know how to handle Canadian English. Much of the time, they’ll let you use the wrong word no problem as long as it’s a word that some other country uses. Spellcheckers are the single biggest threat to Canadian spelling. They’re supposed to be helping you, but if they are even aware you want to use Canadian forms in the first place, spellcheckers blithely authorize all sorts of mild misspellings.
Here’s a real-world example, from a CBC submission on television and “new media”:
It is important to recognise that underlying the current environment is a shift towards personalisation and control, and not a major shift towards new ways of consuming broadcasting. Consumers want what they want, when they want it and where they want it (i.e., personalization). Some Canadians are using the Internet to personalize their TV and radio experiences, but it is not the only way to do this.
In one simple paragraph, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation writes the words personalize and personalization as, variously, personalisation, personalization, and personalize. Recognise is in there for good measure. (CBC refused to answer a question about how that paragraph was put together.)
Those misspellings are hard to spot, and the writers who would most benefit from a rigorous spellcheck are the ones least confident in their own abilities to spell properly. They’re also the least confident in second-guessing a “really smart” computer, and the least able to copy-edit a document for consistency.
Alternatively, you or whoever set up your computer didn’t realize there were different language versions available, so your system defaults to U.S. English (or, less likely, British) and adamantly insists that neighbours or cheques is a misspelling. It’s just easier to let the software “correct” your “errors” for you.
I’m sorry to sound a bit dramatic here, but the effect of computer spellchecking is denationalization (not denationalisation) by stealth. It erases the Canadian border with the U.S. It turns back the geologic clock to a kind of Jules Verne science-fiction scenario in which the British Isles and the United States of Canada are a single land mass. It reunites our country with the same-sex parents that gave us our English language.
In what I call the Coquitlam effect, when writing Canadian English your software might indeed be doing something to your spelling, but “checking” is not what it’s doing. It permits you to intermingle different national variants, allowing most of them at least some of the time. Under the Coquitlam effect, you can set up your software any way you want, but nothing you do will induce the software to correct your spelling according to Canadian rules.
There’s little or nothing you can do about it: Your software may not acknowledge Canadian English exists, or may frustrate your attempts to set your writing to Canadian, or just let you use British or American spellings anyway.
This phenomenon has been noted in only one other place I could find: The Editors’ Association of Canada’s Editing Canadian English (2000) notes that spellcheckers “do not reflect the essentially Canadian practice of selecting from both British and American forms.”
You are pretty much stuck with the spellchecker your program gives you. It is possible with some programs (notably WordPerfect) to add and delete words from the dictionary, but in practice, you aren’t going to bother.
In theory there’s an alternative now – the OpenOffice “suite” of applications. It isn’t the only such suite, but it is the most important. You can download OpenOffice and, with some minor restrictions, you can reprogram the application and reuse it, all for free. Because you can look at and modify the underlying source code that powers the application, OpenOffice is deemed to be open source.
Of course OpenOffice includes a word processor, and of course that word processor can check your spelling. It can do so in about 80 discrete languages, including six variants of English – Canadian, Australian, British, New Zealand, South African, and American. (There are a few additional dictionaries, as for Australian place names.) You can write your own spellcheck dictionary if you wish and make it available for download. Conversely, you can also download the various dictionaries and inspect them.
I did just that with the Canadian lexicon. I printed and checked its largest version. The terminology is confusing here: I used the 95th-percentile list, containing “354,984 single words and 256,772 compound words,” but it actually is only a list of the words that differ from the base set. I didn’t read every word, but I looked for telltale confusable words.
A few listings were outright mistakes:
Some words akin to coloration mistakenly include a U (ambicolourate). Dialysis may be dialysis everywhere, but dialyzing isn’t dialysing in Canada, hence nondialysing and undialysed are errors. Same with paralysedly (which, again, I doubt is “a real word”).
Canadian -re endings (centre, sombre) can have unpleasant implications – ochreish is like fibreoptic in that it may be technically correct but rather odd to look at. (Ochreish means sort of ochre, or sort of dull brownish-yellow, like some old Volkswagen campers.)
Do you think sepulchre (a crypt or a tomb) can also be a verb? Apparently – and you can verb it and verb it again (resepulchre).
There’s a strong tendency toward doubled consonants: coralled, autodialler.
It seems, then, that open-source software, at zero cost and with barely any money behind it, is better at Canadian spelling than Microsoft Word for Windows.
And if you're wondering about the source of the quotation at the beginning of this chapter, it's from a recent proponent of loosening up English spelling, Ken Smith, quoted in Time by Laura Fitzpatrick (“Making an Arguement for Misspelling,” 2008.08.12). Sadly, Smith’s confidence would appear to be misplaced, or at least inapplicable to Canadians.
If spellcheckers reliably steer you wrong when you’re trying to spell Canadian, what are you supposed to do?
You could use a spellchecker the way I do: As a means of correcting typing errors. Don’t rely on it to actually spell words correctly. This advice will not help you if you aren’t already good at spelling. Hence the paradox of computer spellcheckers: The people who need them the most get the worst results.
Next: Advice from the style mavens →
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