nouns - Why isn't "citizen" spelled as "citisen" in British English?


In British English vocabulary, most words with "z" are spelled with "s". For example, "capitalization" is "capitalisation", "industrialization" is "industrialisation".


But for some words, like "citizen", for example, it has a "z" instead of a "s". Why is this like this?



Answer



There is a suffix that is written only as -ize in American English and often -ise in British English (but not always, as ShreevatsaR points out in the comments). This suffix attaches to a large number of words, thus the s/z alternation shows up in a large number of words. Citizen does not have the -ize/-ise suffix.


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