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British and American spellings are mixed

spelling-consistencyon by default (info)English

British and American spellings (colour and color) mixed in one document

Example

How to fix

Match the spelling the rest of the document uses. If the team has decided, write it in the style guide.

Why it matters

British and American spellings (colour and color, centre and center, organise and organize) are both correct English. What reads badly is mixing them in one document, which makes search treat them as different words and makes another writer's paragraph stand out. chaff does not decide which is right; it points at whichever the document uses less. -ise and -ize are compared on their own, since Oxford spelling writes colour with organize. A word capitalised in the middle of a sentence (Labor Day, World Health Organization) is a name and is not counted, nor is anything in quotation marks or a word quoted on its own (‘organize’). The literature preset turns it off, since old spelling belongs to its time. It says nothing when the minority is more than a third, since the document then mixes them on purpose (quotations, fixed terms).

What it does not flag

Neither spelling is called right. -ise and -ize are compared on their own, so Oxford spelling (colour with organize) is consistent. Names capitalised mid-sentence (Labor Day) and quotations are not counted.

Turning it off or relaxing it

This page is built from the rule's definition file:packages/chaff/rules/spelling-consistency.yaml