Canadian / US / British English Spelling Converter
Paste your text, pick a source and target variety, and get it re-spelled instantly. Unlike generic “UK to US” converters, this one ships a genuine Canadian preset - British -our and -re endings combined with American -ize and -yze endings, which is what Canadian Press style actually calls for.
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385 headwords · 1,551 word forms in the dictionary
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What actually makes Canadian spelling Canadian
Canadian English is not “British with American -or” and it is not “American with colour”. It is a specific, consistent hybrid, and the combination below is its fingerprint:
| Feature | American | British | Canadian |
|---|---|---|---|
| -our endings | color, favor | colour, favour | colour, favourBritish |
| -re endings | center, fiber | centre, fibre | centre, fibreBritish |
| -ce nouns | defense, license | defence, licence | defence, licenceBritish |
| Doubled L | traveled, canceled | travelled, cancelled | travelled, cancelledBritish |
| Single L | fulfill, enrollment | fulfil, enrolment | fulfil, enrolmentBritish |
| -ize verbs | realize, organize | realise, organise | realize, organizeAmerican |
| -yze verbs | analyze, paralyze | analyse, paralyse | analyze, paralyzeAmerican |
| ae / oe | pediatric, fetus | paediatric, foetus | pediatric, fetusAmerican |
| Vocabulary | tire, curb, truck | tyre, kerb, lorry | tire, curb, truckAmerican |
Sources: the Canadian Press Stylebook (which defers to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, with exceptions in CP's Caps and Spelling) and the spelling conventions documented for Canadian English. The one place this tool refuses to guess for you is homographs - words like check, tire, story and practice whose spelling depends on which meaning you intended. Those are listed for review rather than silently swapped.
Preguntas frecuentes
Is this Canadian English spelling converter online free?
Yes - it's completely free, has no sign-up, and no word limit. The whole dictionary and conversion engine run in your browser as plain JavaScript, so your text is never uploaded to a server and you can paste an entire manuscript into it.
Is Canadian spelling just British spelling?
No, and that's the most common mistake. Canadian English keeps British -our (colour, favour), -re (centre, fibre), -ce nouns (defence, licence) and doubled L (travelled, cancelled), but it uses the AMERICAN -ize and -yze endings (realize, organize, analyze, paralyze), American ae/oe simplification (pediatric, fetus, encyclopedia) and American vocabulary (tire, curb, truck, gasoline, skeptic). A converter that just applies a British preset will give you 'realise' and 'tyre', which are wrong for Canada.
Should British English use -ise or -ize?
Both are correct British English, and this is genuinely a house-style choice rather than a right/wrong question. -ise is the more widely used default in Britain and is the style of The Guardian, The Times (since 1992), The Economist, The Telegraph and Cambridge University Press - so it's what this tool uses by default. -ize is 'Oxford spelling', the house style of Oxford University Press and many academic and scientific publishers, and is used because those verbs come from the Greek -izein. Tick the Oxford toggle to switch. Note that -yse words are different: 'analyse' keeps its s even in Oxford spelling, because it isn't from that Greek suffix. Canadian English resolves the question entirely by using -ize and -yze.
Why didn't it change 'check' to 'cheque' or 'tire' to 'tyre'?
Because those words are homographs and a blind find-and-replace on them produces nonsense. 'Check' only becomes 'cheque' in the banking sense - checking a box, a checkmark, a checked shirt and a hockey check all stay 'check' in British and Canadian English. 'Tire' only becomes 'tyre' for a wheel, never for the verb meaning to grow weary. Same story for story/storey, meter/metre, program/programme, practice/practise, licence/license, curb/kerb, draft/draught and disk/disc. This tool lists every one it found, explains the distinction, and lets you decide - or you can tick 'auto-apply ambiguous words' if you know your text only uses the convertible sense.
How many words does the dictionary cover?
A few hundred base headwords across every category where the varieties diverge (-our/-or, -re/-er, -ise/-ize, -yse/-yze, doubled and single L, -ce/-se, ae/oe ligatures, -ogue/-og and one-off spellings), automatically expanded into several thousand inflected forms - plurals, past tenses, -ing forms, agent nouns and -ation nouns. You can browse and search the entire list side by side at the bottom of the tool.
Will it wrongly change words like 'humorous' or 'analysis'?
No. The dictionary is a curated word list, not a set of blanket suffix rules, precisely so it avoids the classic over-eager replacements. Words that drop the u in every variety - humorous, vigorous, laborious, honorary, odorous - are deliberately excluded, and so are the verbs that are always spelled -ise everywhere (advertise, advise, comprise, compromise, exercise, promise, supervise, surprise, televise). 'Analysis' and 'paralysis' are nouns spelled the same on both sides of the Atlantic and are never touched.