Is the spelling sanitizer or sanitiser?

The main time I tend to use hand sanitiser, or is that hand sanitizer, is when I’m on a cruise before I eat. I’ve also used it when visiting people in a hospital, or in an aged care facility. It makes sense.

However, now with COVID-19, all that has changed and now it becomes part of your regular routine.

The question then is, is the Australian spelling with the ‘s’ or the ‘z’?

A check of Google for sites ending in .au for the words sanitiser and sanitizer, returns 1.19 million results for the ‘s’ spelling and 464,000 for the ‘z’ spelling.  A check of the Australian Oxford Dictionary and the Macquarie Dictionary for the words sanitise and sanitize, gives us sanitise with the ‘s’ as the primary spelling and sanitize with the ‘z’ as the secondary spelling.

In Australia the preferred spelling uses the ‘s’ for the word sanitiser and its various forms.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.Australian-Dictionary.com.au

Question received regarding how often the dictionary files are updated and the upgrade policy.

I received two questions recently regarding the dictionary files I produce. I thought the questions were very good and I wanted to share the answer with everyone.

The questions were:

How often are the files updated?

What is the upgrade policy?

Now in my ideal world I'd have lots of people purchasing the dictionary files which would enable me to put in the time required to release regular updates. Ideally, I wanted to make the updates free for anyone who had purchased the files.

Unfortunately my ideal world and reality don't match very well. I understand that people won't understand the time involved in finding and researching the words I include or exclude from the dictionary files. Each word is reviewed, but some words reviewed can take quite a long time to review. The time involved is considerable.

For this reason it's not viable for me to simply provide free updates. The time to update the documentation and the files packaged as zip files also takes some time.

To be frank, the money from sales each year would not cover the time involved each year.

For this reason, at this stage, I feel the best approach is for people to purchase the current release for the relatively small cost. The package received is better than anything else currently available in my humble opinion. Then in a couple of years time, if there's sufficient changes to the newly released files, people are then welcome to purchase the new release. Those benefiting from the work I do are then contributing to the ongoing development.

When a new release is available I will send out an email to everyone who has purchased the relevant files and let them know the update is available. Whether they purchase the update or not is entirely their choice.

In terms of how often the updates occur I have no clear answer, but I would say for the actual packages I sell it would be a number of years. It's is currently nearly four years since the last update was released.

Word Check, which is the online tool available to everyone for free, is updated regularly with new words added (a few have been removed), as I find words and research the words to see if the words should or shouldn't be included.

I hope this answers the questions for anyone who is interested.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.Australian-Dictonary.com.au