Consistent Spelling Checker

The Consistent Spelling Checker compares 95 published US and UK pairs across a whole document — color and colour, center and centre, defense and defence — and reports the mix rather than the spelling, because both forms are correct English.

What is Consistent Spelling Checker?

American and British spellings are both correct; what reads badly is a document that uses one in the heading and the other in the paragraph. This consistent spelling checker exists for that problem and not for correctness. It compares US and UK spellings as two conventions rather than right and wrong, which is why its verdict is always about the document: it leans US, it leans UK, it mixes, or it contains none of the variants it knows.

Spelling consistency is a document-level property, so the whole text is analysed at once. Ninety-five pairs are published on the page: color and colour, center and centre, defense and defence, catalog and catalogue, gray and grey, jewelry and jewellery, analyze and analyse, traveled and travelled and the rest of the list. On top of the listed pairs, three families are matched by their shared stem so a word that was never listed is still caught. The -ize and -ise family pairs organize with organise; the -yze and -yse family pairs analyze with analyse; and sixteen stems cover the doubled-consonant group, where traveled and travelled sit side by side. Stem matching is what makes the check useful on technical prose, where a writer picks up a suffix from a house style and applies it to words no list would enumerate.

The exclusions matter as much as the entries. Check and cheque, tire and tyre, curb and kerb, draft and draught, and storey and story are different words now, not variants of one another, so they are not compared and a document is never told to change them on this tool's account. The doubled-consonant group is matched against a published list of stems rather than by collapsing every double letter, because a blind rule pairs words that have nothing to do with each other — filed and filled, tiled and tilled — and those are different words with different meanings.

A rule that applies to one side alone would produce noise, so the stem-matched families are reported only when both shapes appear in the document. Using traveled throughout is not evidence of anything, because both spellings are accepted on both sides of the Atlantic; using traveled and travelled in one draft is. The listed pairs work the other way round: they are reported even when the document is consistent, because then they are evidence of which variant the writer chose, and the summary counts both sides so the lean is visible.

Findings come with the family, the forms found, the rule that matched and a status. A family marked mixed is a seam a reader can see; a family with one variant is simply the convention the document has settled into. Copy report and Download give the whole picture, which is the useful thing to hand to a co-author or an editor when the question is which convention the publication uses.

Both verdicts are legitimate outcomes. If the document is consistently British, nothing needs changing; if it is consistently American, the same. The tool reports the mix because a mix is the thing a reader notices, and leaves the choice of variant where it belongs — with the writer and the publication.

How to use Consistent Spelling Checker

1. Paste the whole document, not a paragraph: consistency is only visible across the full text.
2. Read the verdict first — a consistent result needs no changes at all.
3. If the result is mixed, open the families table and look at the rows marked mixed.
4. Choose the variant the document leans on and bring the outliers into line with it.
5. Re-check after editing, since a family can drop out of the report once only one form remains.

When to use Consistent Spelling Checker vs related tools

Use this checker when a document has more than one author or has been through several revision passes, which is when variants drift. When the problem is a word the dictionary does not contain at all, the Spell Checker is the right tool, and when the question is whether the draft follows a named house style, the Style Guide Adherence Checker checks a published list of rules.

If a mixed result is really a punctuation or sentence-level habit, the Grammar Checker runs its mechanical checks over the same text so both questions are covered in one pass.

Privacy & Security

This tool runs entirely in your browser — no data ever leaves your device. There is no server round-trip, no upload, no logging, and no account required. Your input is processed locally using client-side JavaScript and is never stored, transmitted, or accessible to anyone else. When you close the tab, everything disappears.

Frequently asked questions about Consistent Spelling Checker