-i[s/z]e

[mirrorshard]

Words ending therewith, as requested by nou.

The rule I use - which I think I learned from Fowler, many years ago, but don't have it handy to check - is that if the word stem can stand on its own, you use -ize, and otherwise -ise.

Therefore, advertise, but ionize (ie. to make something into an ion - 'advert' is a back-formation from 'advertisement'). Politics can be radicalized, and negative effects minimized, but one usually has to compromise somewhere.

There are more complex etymological explanations for this, but I'm not going to go into them, partly because they're (almost) all special cases and exceptions. Insofar as English is amenable to rules like this, this one works.

Besides, it's a good excuse to use more Zs, and there aren't nearly enough of them.

[Poll #738721]

Comments

[kake]

More right in what sense? In that they feel more right to you, or that you've never seen any house style which considers them acceptable?