Oxford spelling

Oxford spelling (plural Oxford spellings)

1. English spelling as used in Oxford publications, this being mostly the usual British spelling but with the letter z used in the suffixes -ize and -ization.
   • 1897, Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay, James Greenleaf Croswell, Essays on Milton and Addison, Longmans, Green, page 97:

     He was entered at Queen's College, Oxford; but he had not been many months there, when some of his Latin verses fell by accident into the hands of Dr. Lancaster, Dean of Magdalene College.*
     [note] Pronounced “Maudlin” The Oxford spelling is Magdalen.

   • 1917, Bookplate Quarterly, v 1, n 1, American Bookplate Society, p 31:

     But the repudiation at Oxford of the Oxford spelling of thirty years ago removes the last prop from the tumbling hyphen, and now there is no reason why any one who writes about bookplates should not follow established literary usage.

   • 1928, Ameen Fares Rihani, Ibn Sa’oud of Arabia: His People and His Land, Houghton Mifflin, page 29:

     [I] rode out with Saiyed Hashem to visit the site of ‘a very ancient city’ not far from the qasr, which must have been a village of mud huts built fifty years ago—I know too well the Arab's sense of time and space (in fact there was not a stone to be seen and what m companion described as the ancient city wall is a semi-circular ridge not more than five hundred feet long); but I started to say that the boy who walked behind my thelul, or according to the standard Oxford spelling zelul¹ (my literary friends in America, who have accused me of eccentricity in the transliteration of Arabic words of which I know the pronunciation and, therefore, how they should be written, will not blame me, I hope, for following deferentially the learned Arabists of Oxford)—but what about the boy that was walking behind my zelul?

   • 1929, Frances Newman, Hansell Baugh, Frances Newman's Letters, Liveright, page 212:

     . . . my Oxford spelling to Webster spelling.

   • 1992, James L. W. West III, The Chace Act and Anglo-American Literary Relations, in Studies in Bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, v 45, University of Virginia Bibliographical Society, p 308:

     The net effect of such attitudes was to require American publishers to have some of their books typeset in a style of British orthography known as "modified Oxford spelling.”

   • 1998, Ben Young, Dixionia: A Bio-Discography of Bill Dixon, Greenwood Publishing Group, pages 12–13:

     “. . . At that time I was a very good typist, knew Oxford spelling, and could do verbatim dictation.”

   • 2007, Éric Brian, Marie Jaisson, Karen George transl., The Descent of Human Sex Ratio at Birth: A Dialogue Between Mathematics, Biology and Sociology, Springer, pp xi–xii:

     It was decided to adopt the “Oxford” spelling conventions preferred in most British English academic publications, conventions which are most comfortable for an international readership.

• Oxford comma