Differences between British and American English

How many English variants are there? Being students, not teachers, we won’t claim to know the exact number – let’s just say that there are twenty different spell-checkers for English available in the LibreOffice suite. But we can confidently claim that the main two variants are the British English and the American English.

So, we set forth into the territory of English differences with the objective of recapping them in the simplest possible form – i.e. a table. Taking advantage of the C levels of English studied at the Languages Official School of Vigo, the resources of the Writing & Speaking Center of the University of Nevada, Reno, and The Punctuation Guide, this is the simplest summary we can come up with:

Subject	British English	American English
Quotations	‘If you read this quotation’, I say, ‘you will notice that it includes a smaller “this is a quotation too”’.	“If you read this quotation,” I say, “you will notice that it includes a smaller ‘this is a quotation too.’”
Titles	Mr, Mrs, Ms	Mr., Mrs., Ms.
Time	10.30	10:30
Dates	Man on the moon 20/7/1969	Man on the moon 7/20/1969
Collective Nouns	The team are here to help you	The team is here to help you
Past Tense Forms	Burnt, dreamt, learnt, spilt, spoilt	Burned, dreamed, learned, spilled, spoiled
Past Tense	Have you found it?	Did you find it?
Conditional	If I was a rich man, if he was a king	If I were a rich man, if he were a king
Spelling	'-ae-' or '-oe-': foetus, encyclopaedia	'-e-': fetus, encyclopedia
	‘-ell’: cancelled, jeweller	‘-el’: canceled, jeweler
	'-ence': defence, licence	'-ense': defense, license
	'-ise' or '-yse': organise, analyse	'-ize' or '-yze': organize, analyze
	‘-l’: enrol, fulfill	‘-ll’: enroll, fulfill
	'-mme' or '-nne': programme, tonne	'-m' or '-n': program, ton
	‘-ogue’: analogue, monologue	‘-og’: analog, monolog
	‘-our’: colour, flavour	‘-or’: color, flavor
	'-re': centre, theatre	'-er': center, theater

We left out some other differences – i.e. the British ‘I like watching TV’ versus American ‘I like to watch TV’ because of not being really exclusive (‘I like to watch TV’ being used by British too).

So, this blog called ‘We Study English’, what English does it mean? All of them, of course. But when we write, we try to use British English. If sometimes we don’t, you can call it a mistake.