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It does sometimes, though its use may mark the author as among the agèd.

Not to mention loanwords, which of course English is full of, and are sometimes considered properly spelt with their original accents, though many will spell them naïvely without.

Diphthongs too, especially in British English, are not just an archæological find, though out of pragmatism usually written digitally with two separate characters.



On the internet the most marked issue is the difference between British English spellings (England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and the USA. It is frustrating that on most spell checked text boxes words like: harbour, labour, actualise, etc shown as misspelt.

I find it most irksome that the Australian Labor Party has chosen the USA spelling in spite of being part of the Commonwealth.


The great thing about using Singapore as my locale is that it accepts pretty much any English spelling you throw at it, British or American. You see quite a mix of both on signs and documents here, too.


After enough programming over the years, I feel like my mind has separated the concept of a colour (which I learned as a child) and `Color` data.


For me (Brit), ‘program’ is some software and ‘programme’ is a collection of projects, in the project management sense


me too: 'dialog' is a computer popup; 'dialogue' is a verbal exchange


It gets worse. Canadian is different to both British and American (or it has some of each) and Australian is different again from all three.


Did you mean misspelled


> As a result of these circumstances, things like spelling practices varied from one place to another, and one scribe to another. The same word could even be written on the same page in multiple ways.

I believe we can all still be confident scribes and maybe even have our own preferred way of writing words, where we within reason push the boundaries or push our own viewpoints through self expression :D


"mispelt" is a somewhat archaic British spelling. "mispelled" is more modern.


No it isn't. -t instead of -ed in general for many words is dialectal for one thing, more commonly retained (a Saxonism) in the West Country than elsewhere. Misspelled in particular though is distinctly American, everywhere in Britain uses misspelt.

(Ironically, I'm not sure if deliberately ironically, you 'mispelt' both, fwiw.)


> though its use may mark the author as among the agèd

Thirtysomething here. I use diaeresis (a/k/a diæresis) over e.g. coöperate. It’s more concise than a hyphen. And it makes more sense than cooperate, given cooper is a word.


Thirtysomething here too. I see a diaeresis in naïve often enough to remember that it happens yet uncommon enough to be taken by surprise anyway.


So we can use them if you're feeling fancy or writing for The New Yorker




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