How to Get British Spelling When You Dictate on a Mac
Colour, not color. How to make dictation on your Mac write British spelling, what it changes, and the few words it leaves alone.
In this article
If you write in British English, dictation has a small, constant annoyance built in. You say “colour” and it writes “color”. You say “organisation” and get “organization”. Each one is a two-second fix, and after a page of dictation there are twenty of them.
This post explains why that happens and how to make dictation on your Mac write British spelling from the start. It uses EnviousWispr, a free dictation app for Mac, which added an English (UK) option in version 2.5.1.
Why dictation writes American spelling
Both speech engines write English with American spelling. When you say “colour”, the engine hears the word correctly and writes “color”, most likely because American spelling dominates the text such models learn from.
The two engines EnviousWispr runs on your Mac, Parakeet and WhisperKit, both behave this way. Your accent has nothing to do with it. A speaker from Leeds and a speaker from Boston get the same spelling, because the spelling comes from the engine, not from your voice. The spelling differences themselves are well documented; Wikipedia’s page on them is a good overview.
How to switch to British spelling
Turn off auto-detect. Click the EnviousWispr icon in your menu bar, choose Open EnviousWispr, go to Dictation Settings > Engine, and switch off Auto-detect language.
Choose English (UK). Click Change and pick English (UK), directly under English. Its line reads “British spelling: colour, organise, centre”.
Dictate a test sentence. Try “the colour of the organisation’s centre”. You will know it is working when the result says colour, organisation and centre.
That is the whole setup. It applies to live dictation and to Transcribe a File, with AI polish on or off.
What changes and what does not
The conversion covers the everyday spelling families: -our words (colour, favourite), -re words (centre), -ise words (organise), doubled consonants (travelled). Here is what to expect beyond that.
| Situation | What happens |
|---|---|
| AI polish is on | Spelling is changed before polish and checked again after, so a polish model cannot quietly put “color” back |
| A word whose spelling depends on meaning | Left as you said it: program, check, practice, license, meter, story and tire |
| A name in the middle of a sentence | Kept as written, so “Kennedy Center” stays “Center” (a name at the very start of a sentence can still change) |
| A word in your Custom Words | Kept exactly as you saved it |
| Vocabulary | Unchanged: “apartment” stays “apartment”, it does not become “flat” |
| Auto-detect is on | American spelling, because British spelling needs English (UK) chosen |
The meaning-dependent words are left alone on purpose. “Program” is British for a computer program and “programme” for a television one, and the app cannot know which you meant, so it does not guess.
Live Preview in British English
If you use Live Preview, the words that appear while you speak come from a separate preview engine. With the macOS preview engine, it uses the English (United Kingdom) language pack, which you may need to download on the Live Preview settings page first. The Live Preview page shows how the preview works.
Other languages and the app’s own language
British spelling is one part of a wider set of language options. Parakeet recognises 25 European languages and works out which one you are speaking, and WhisperKit covers 99+. The app’s own menus can also be shown in German. The Languages page covers all of it, and the help article Multi-Language Dictation has the step-by-step detail.
The takeaway
Dictation writes American spelling because that is how the speech engines spell English, not because of how you speak. Choose English (UK) as your dictation language in EnviousWispr and it writes colour, centre and organise from the first word, including when AI polish is cleaning up the text.
