Changing dictionary from British English to U.S. English?

Question

Level 2

322 points

Changing dictionary from British English to U.S. English?

Pages on my iPad seems to have defaulted to the British dictionary and keeps wanting me to change American spellings to British spellings. I checked the keyboard settings, and they're set for the U.S. keyboard, but Pages doesn't seem to follow that setting.

As a test, I opened the Notes app and typed a word (westernized) that Pages flags as misspelled. Nope, Notes accepts the U.S. spelling. I then typed the same word into Notes using the British spelling, and the dictionary flagged it and suggested the U.S. spelling. So the problem seems to be with Pages.

Is there some trick to this? Perhaps a setting within Pages that controls the dictionary's language within the Pages app?.

Thanks!

Message was edited by: Steve Porritt

MacBook Pro 2gHz, iMac 24" 3.06gHz, iMac G5 20" 2 gHz, Mac OS X (10.6), 1TB TC, Airport Express, Airport Extreme, iPad 3G+wi-fi 32GB

Posted on Jul 11, 2010 11:42 PM

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Answer 1

Jul 27, 2010 3:24 AM in response to Steve Porritt

Pages is not particularly clever here.

My setup is "English" as language. (US? UK? South African? It will not tell.) I use English (UK) as keyboard.

When I type "realised", the auto-complete function enthusiastically "corrects" this to "realized", after which the spell-checker, equally eager, underlines this as a spelling mistake. I can then double-tap the word, choose "More...", choose "Replace..." and then replace "realized" with the "realised" I had typed myself 10 seconds earlier.

This is not a device for fast typing.

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Answer 2

Steve Porritt Author

Level 2

322 points

Jul 27, 2010 5:25 PM in response to SermoDaturCunctis

Hmmmm, I haven't seen that behavior in Pages. Everything comes up British spellings in all instances.

One factor that may be influencing this is my location. I live in Japan and bought Pages for the iPad from the Japanese store. No reason to suspect that there are multiple versions of Pages for various countries, but as Pages is the ONLY app on my iPad (also bought in Japan) that exhibits this anglophile behavior, I'm beginning to wonder. How many other users have bought Pages from a non-U.S. iTunes store and how many of those users are having dictionary issues?

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Answer 3

Steve Porritt Author

Level 2

322 points

Jul 27, 2010 6:41 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

So the questions remain, why only Pages, and how can I change the default dictionary for Pages? I can find nothing in the Pages documentation about this, and it's getting to be quite annoying. Arrgghh!

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Answer 4

Jul 27, 2010 11:53 PM in response to DewAbides

DewAbides wrote:
You could always just sprinkle a few words like "cheerio" throughout your documents, and people will just think that you're British.

"But I didn' have no luck. Cheerio! When we 'uz mos' down to de head er de islan' a man begin to come, cheerio, aft wid de lantern, I see it warn't no use fer to wait, so I slid overboard en struck out fer de islan', cor blimey. Well, I had a notion I could lan' mos' anywhers, but I couldn't--bank too bluff. Cheerio! I 'uz mos' to de foot er de islan' b'fo' I found' a good place. I went into de woods en jedged I wouldn' fool wid raffs no mo', long as dey move de cheerio lantern roun' so. I had my pipe en a plug er dog-leg, en some matches in my cap, en dey warn't wet, so I 'uz all right. Cheerio, cheerio!"

It works! We can mark this thread as solved.

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