Chapter 21: UK spellings

Intro

Lapwing theory is very North American centred as that is the dialect of English I am familiar with. However, being from Canada, I often need to use both American and British spellings of words in writing. I’ve created a dictionary that adds in British spellings with alternative outlines. Unfortunately, this dictionary does not account for pronunciation differences, and it also prioritises the American forms of words—there may not always be short briefs available for British spellings.

Ideally, there would be a separate stand-alone lapwing dictionary for British English, but creating one would be very difficult, particularly for someone who does not speak this dialect. If you would like to contribute a lapwing dictionary for British speakers, please do get in touch!

Setup

Ensure that plover-lapwing-aio is installed and Lapwing is selected as the system. Alternatively, if you are setting up Lapwing manually (not recommended), ensure that lapwing-uk-additions.json is in your dictionary stack.

Quick switching

The recommended way to switch from an American word to its British form is by using #TPH as a suffix stroke of sorts. This is guaranteed to always work unlike the other methods outlined later.

Examples

center SEPB/TER
- centre SEPB/TER/#TPH
fulfill TPUL/TPEUL
- fulfil TPUL/TPEUL/#TPH
harbor HAR/PWOR
- harbour HAR/PWOR/#TPH
organize OR/TKPWA/TPHAOEUZ
- organise OR/TKPWA/TPHAOEUZ/#TPH

Dealing with suffixes

If you are writing a word with a suffix, switch the word into its British form first before writing the suffix. It is not guaranteed to work if the suffix is written before #TPH.