Visualize or visualise?

29th Jul, 2015 | random

I tried to do the right thing on some recent posts about Audiospex, which represents an audio signal on an iPhone/iPad screen.

The word I used was "visualise", which according to a quick search was the correct (UK) english spelling. I'm not American, so wanted to keep real to my roots.

This assumption is, as it turns out, a bit wrong.

As mentioned on wikipedia the 'ise' suffix is French in origin. Here it states that the Oxford English Dictionary recommends 'ize'.

The actual fact is the word visualise and visualize are both correct, but visualise is not widely recognised in the US.

Definitions in wiki's and blogs is one thing, hard facts is another.

So what does google think? Here's a google trends chart of the 2 words:

Fairly conclusive!

From this I've just updated my text descriptions for the app to use visualize. It's fine. It's popular, correct and valid worldwide!