For practical reasons (to avoid ambiguity and hesitation) I have decided to discard the hyphen in hyphenated words and to treat them as a single word. Thus if you should type "absent-minded", "run-of-the-mill" or "state-of-the-art" (i.e. with the hyphens) you will not get an answer but if you type "absentminded", "runofthemill" or "stateoftheart" (yes, without the hyphens) you would. Over the course of time hyphenated words tend to lose their hyphens anyway.
In general where there are differences between the American and British spellings I have kept to the British spelling rather than the American one (question of habit). So look under -our instead of -or (eg. "colour" not "color"), -re instead of -er (eg. "meagre" not "meager") and -ae instead of -e- (eg. "aesthetic" not "esthetic").
Verbs that can end in either -ize or -ise. Look for them under -ize as they won't appear under -ise (eg. "criticize" not "criticise"). The -ize form is acceptable both in British English and American English and is now considered to be the world English spelling for such verbs.
Common idiomatic phrases or expressions are given (see the word "take" as an example). - Webmaster
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