UK spelling option

By iohuasdfhoijk - updated: 3 years, 10 months ago - 4 messages

Every time a US spelling of a word appears I trip up and it's annoying because this isn't my fault.
There is no option to select between US and UK English spelling. I would quite like for this to be an option.
However I feel that separating the UK and US quotes like what is currently done with different languages would not be desirable. So I propose a system that will translate between UK and US English by replacing words like "Favorite" and "Favourite", "Color" and "Colour"
I'm sure there is some API out there that could easily do this.
Alternativly it could be made so it will accept any variation of a spelling as a valid spelling.
By hunterz1200 - posted: 3 years, 10 months ago

I get that it could be annoying, but the point of a typing test is to type out the characters in front of you. If you type them out quickly and get really good at it, the spelling of the words you're typing won't matter all that much.

I've practiced enough that fictional, mythical, or otherworldy names and words aren't super hard to type out perfectly as they're just a combination of letters--just words.

So yes, I get that it could be really annoying, but messing up because a word isn't spelled in the way that your specific country does it seems like it points to another issue. That tells me you're predicting the words as they come, which can lead to mistakes when your predictions are incorrect. I used to do this myself--always guessing what word might be next--and it was actually bad for my overall typing speed.

I don't want to come off as rude, but I also think the difference between typing out "favorite" and "favourite" is so minimal that making an entire system just to 'translate' the spellings feels like overkill.

That's just my two-cents, anyway
-Kaiser
By user216575 - posted: 3 years, 10 months ago

I understand where OP is coming from. I do not think that the point of this site is to train ourselves to simply `type out the characters in front of you' as @hunterz1200 put it. The main aim should be to train our muscle memory for standard words and to type as we read unfamiliar words.

I read 2 words ahead as I type so as to preempt myself for what is to so if it is a word that I am familiar with, I would let my muscle memory continue its work. Unfamiliar words such as fictional, mythical, or otherworldly names, on the other hand, would trigger me to pay attention to the characters which make up the word instead of the word as a whole.

So the spelling option here does play a crucial role, my muscles have to be conditioned to spelling words in 2 different standards and I worry that it leaks over in my reports. I do hope that an option for UK spelling gets implemented.
By iohuasdfhoijk - posted: 3 years, 10 months ago

Totally see where you're coming from here, but I have to disagree on your point about reading words letter by letter.
Research like this https://www.mrc-cbu… show that the human brain is very good at word detection, even when the letters are out of order, out brains (normally) don't read letter by letter.
I'm not sure if you're suggesting that you have trained to avoid this behaviour, maybe to some extent this is possible, but I would argue its benefit.

As for your comment about how making an system to translate would be overkill. Well I agree that making a system like this is probably quite a lot of work, and is difficult to maintain. But as a software developer, I can tell you that you often don't need to re-invent the wheel. Someone would have already solved the same problem.
I can't link any examples of programs that do this, Tbh I haven't done any looking. But I don't imagine it will be too difficult to find at the very least a dictionary of word translations. Its for the dev's to decided on how easy this would be to implement.
Updated 3 years, 10 months ago
By hunterz1200 - posted: 3 years, 10 months ago

It's not so much that I trained my brain to read each letter in the test letter by letter, but more than I make an effort to focus on the word I'm typing. A lot of the time I hear it's beneficial to predict what word might come next, or even read the words ahead, but I've found that doing that just doesn't quite work out all the time. If someone phrases something differently than I might have, or perhaps there's an actual grammatical or spelling error in that text, by focusing on the word at hand I'm more likely to type it out as is.

Could just be something I do, but I dunno. I've definitely gotten my WPM scores to a level where improvements come fairly slowly, so if there's something that could get them faster like predicing what might come next, I'll definitely look into it.

-Kaiser