1-Jul-2008 You’ve spelt “analyse” wrong!

Depending on where you’re located, the way we spell “Analyse-it” may intrigue you. We chose the name in 1997 as it sounded active, a direction to analyse it! – similar to many product names of the time.

The name has served us well and hints as to what our business and product offers.

At the time we didn’t think such a simple name would cause so many headaches. Before you wonder, Analyse-it doesn’t mean anything offensive in other languages, but it can be spelt different ways:

If you’re from the US, the obvious spelling is “Analyze-it”. If English isn’t your first language, “Analise-it” or “Analize-it” seems to be the natural spelling. Then there’s the hyphen – with or without? Combined there are 16 variations.

The variations have sometimes caused customers to send e-mail to the wrong company, or made finding our web-site difficult. We’ve also had the occasional e-mail suggesting we can’t spell! One of the not-so polite e-mails went like this:

You’ve spelt “analyse” wrong! “Licence” is wrong too! How can I trust your company and products if you can’t even use spell check!

Ouch! The spelling is a clue to our English heritage (see our location). We’re based in England in the United Kingdom in Europe, and that meant we chose to use the English spelling – analyse, licence – rather than the arguably more logical American-English spelling – analyze, license.

Thankfully most search engines now suggest our web-site regardless of which variation you use. More importantly, we’ve acquired many of the alternative-spelled domain names such as www.analyze-it.com, www.analyzeit.com, with and without the hyphen. Owning many of the variations on the domain name means we now get mis-addressed e-mail (and browsers) – and all the spam for these 8-10 domains!