Disable British to American spelling Autocorrect feature

Microsoft Word keeps Autocorrecting my British spelling (e.g. organise) to American spelling (organize).

How do I disable this feature, while still retaining all other features of Autocorrect?

Solution 1:

Set the text to be in the “English (United Kingdom)” language.  In recent versions of Word, this is accessible by going to the “Review” tab, “Language” pane, “Language” button/menu, “Set Proofing Language…”.

You might want to click on “Set As Default”.

Solution 2:

The specific example you give - organise vs. organize - is not related to the proofing language. Both are acceptable spellings in British English, and while the -ise version is most common in British English some style guides - most particularly the OED - use the -ize version.

If you want to have your spell checker reject the -ize version you'll need to add it to Word's exclusion list. This is a file, found at:

C:\Users\KennyLJ\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\UProof\ExcludeDictionaryEN809.lex

You'll have to replace KennyLJ with your actual username. The file contains a list of words that will be marked as wrongly spelled even though they are in the British English dictionary.

You can edit this file with notepad and add organized, organizer etc. to it, one word per line.

Solution 3:

This bugged me for ages and none of the above fixed my issue... I already had the right languages installed (even went so far as to uninstall the US ones) and still it was happening.

I discovered... If you are pasting from another Office document it very annoyingly keeps the proofing language of the document you are copying from for that part of the text... you need to select the new text (or the whole document) and go to:

Review > Language > Set Proofing Language > Select: English U.K.

You can also click Set as Default in here although it still happens if you are copying and pasting in a new document from a document with a different default language so far as I can tell.

Another option could be to edit the document you are copying from (save a copy locally if necessary) and set the language in that one to English U.K. save it, reopen it and then copy and paste.

I don't know why it does this... it's very annoying, you would think there would at least be a way to disable this somewhere but there you go this is how I fixed it for me :)

EDIT: OK apparently you can permanently change it by:

Review > Language > Set Proofing Language > Uncheck: Detect language automatically

Solution 4:

Please be careful about claiming that 'z' spellings are only correct in USA spelling. This is not true. As many have pointed out, while 's' is more popular in the UK, many authoritative dictionaries point out that 'z' is acceptable in British English. I understand that the origin of a word is important in this situation. When we add the suffix 'ize' to a noun, to make it into a verb, we are using a suffix from Greek. Since there was no 's' in the Greek alphabet, we have traditionally used the 'z' spelling. When the 'ise' appears on the end of a word for some other reason, and from a different origin (e.g 'promise') we use the 's'. This is complex, so it has become popular to use the 's' because so many people are not interested in why the 'z' was there in the first place. It is absolutely nothing to do with the USA. Of course, since the dictionary is only a reflection of current usage, it is gradually becoming more acceptable to use the 's' spelling. But the 'z' spellings are more accurate in terms of the origins of words. And, of course, who knows what version of which dictionary is being used by Microsoft?