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Is it focused or focussed? - Australian spelling
In summary the preferred spelling in Australia is focused.
There are two accepted ways of spelling a number of the variations of focus in Australia.
The following are the words I have identified in the dictionary files.
focused
focusing
refocused
refocuses
refocusing
unfocused
focussed
focussing
refocussed
refocusses
refocussing
unfocussed
These words are currently under review for the Kelvin version of the dictionary.
In both the Macquarie and the Oxford the single "s" spelling variation is listed first,
which is an indication of the preferred spelling.
I must admit I was leaning towards the single "s".
However a search of Google and Yahoo for pages from Australia returned the following results.
Google
focussed: 949,000
focused: 559,000
focusses: 25,800
focuses: 492,000
focussing: 227,000
focusing: 467,000
Yahoo
focussed: 1,790,000
focused: 5,470,000
focusses: 83,900
focuses: 2,760,000
focussing: 694,000
focusing: 2,760,000
There are indeed some wacky results in the above searches.
Google goes completely opposite for focussed, but is consistent with the single "s" for all other results.
Yahoo produced the same number of results for focuses and focusing.
That to me is a highly unlikely result and as always the search engines should only be used as a very rough indicator.
At this point I decided to also try the Web Wombat search engine.
This company reportedly concentrates on Australian web sites.
Web Wombat
focussed: 55,323
focused: 197,659
focusses: 4,484
focuses: 119,151
focussing: 29,028
focusing: 97,526
In all cases the single "s" variation was significantly more popular.
Interestingly the focuses had a much greater number of results in all cases to focusses.
Now the Google result still concerned me.
I decided to do a further test and only limited the Google pages to the last 12 months.
The results then are:
focussed: 40,900
focused: 135,000
This result is now consistent with results found via other searches.
Out of pure curiosity I decided to ask Google the question "focused and focussed" for the past year with pages from Australia.
The result was 8,570 where both spelling variations were used in the one document.
Given the results above this is quite a large subset.
This inconsistency of spelling in a single document is one of outcomes the Kelvin version of the dictionary is aiming to avoid.
The preferred spelling in Australia is focused with a single s.
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