Question about how English dialects are handled

[mcecode]

I've only ever written American English so maybe my understanding of this is wrong, but from how I get it, when I want to write, say, "flavor" in British English, it's supposed to be spelled as "flavour". Now, when I was working on #960, I noticed that when I set dialect to British instead of American, it accepts both "flavor" and "flavour" as correct spellings. It's the same with "center" vs "centre", "license" vs "licence", "analyze" vs "analyse", etc. However, it does flag "color". Am I missing some sort of English dialect rule here, or is this a bug?

[hippietrail]

I haven't dug into it yet but I have looked. For these to work properly, each variant of a word needs to be annotated. So at the moment probably one variant is annotated and the other isn't. I plan to attack this kind of thing after my one outstanding dictionary curation PR is merged, which I think is no longer blocked by anything.

You might think these should all be boolean if one is on the other should be off, but this way is better because for some spelling rules only one is valid in a given region, but for others both may be valid in some regions. The main case of this is with -ize vs -ise and ization vs isation. Many British and Australian people believe only -ise and -isation are correct in their regions, but depending on which dictionary or style guide you prefer, both might be listed and -ize and ization might even be listed before -ise and -isation.

If you do a Google search, you'll find all these are in use: colorize, colourise, colourize (and maybe even colorise?)

This way gives us maximum flexibility at the cost of more curation.