And not just British English: spelling aside, the Shorter Oxford is thoroughly American as well.
"The original version" is what Engel calls British English, which is like calling one's firstborn "the original child".
In practice, British English today tends to use -ise, while Americans write -ize.
English is, in truth, a family: American English and British English are siblings from the same parentage, neither is the parent of the other.
The SaypU spelling of "top" and "run" have had to be tweaked to take into account the different vowel sounds of American and British English.
Kathy Rooney, the UK editor-in-chief of Encarta World Dictionary, was surprised by the callers that could tell there was a difference between US and British English.
British colonialism firmly established English in the territories that now make up the United States, but the distinctions between American and British English are as important as the shared heritage.
When Matthew Engel wrote here earlier this month about the impact of American English on British English, he restarted a debate about the changing nature of language which ended in dozens of suggestions from readers of their own loathed Americanisms.
Asked to pick between British and English to describe themselves, only around half of people in England go for the former.
He is particularly withering in his scorn for what he sees as the mystifications of the English parliamentary tradition (allegedly nurtured since the Middle Ages), the trumpery of modern British monarchy, the obscurities of English common law and the mediocrity of the current batch of British politicians.
Pupils in the schools visited "studied a considerable amount of British history" - although this was often English rather than wider British history, inspectors noted.
Ms Sage is an influential literary critic who has taught English at British and American universities.
But, to some extent, we could lose the soul of British football - the English player.
The Scot already held a British passport and became English quite simply and quickly on the basis of a two-year residential qualification.
Merthyr also had the smallest proportion of people who described themselves as English (4%) or both English and British (less than 1%).
Moreover, the strength of the other British nations better enables English players to carry a genuine threat down under when the Lions tour.
Belize, which used to be called British Honduras, has English as a national language and has a legal system based on England just as ours is.
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In a teacher training college in remote Syktyvkar, the unannounced arrival of a British journalist in an English class provokes a lively and well-informed discussion of Rudyard Kipling's novels.
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Unlike the English (who tend to think that being English and British are the same thing), the Scots are quite capable of distinguishing between both identities, and using one or the other when it suits them.
This lingering anxiety in the British body politic reached its apotheosis in the rather more determined rebellion of 1745, led by Charles Edward, which culminated in the Battle of Culloden, where Bonnie Prince Charlie's Highland army was no match for the British both English and Scots redcoats.
There have been lots of names put forward to replace him, some of them English, some British and some foreign.
What's more, according to that poll, the number of people in England who would now describe themselves as English rather than British stands at 63% - up from 41% in 2008.
Labour didn't come into power until the following year but already people knew they were probably going to bring in devolution, and also we played Scotland for the first time in years, so people wanted to celebrate being English rather than British.
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But Margery's letter, as the first English Valentine, has added significance for scholars and is currently part of a British Library exhibition on the evolution of the English language.
Saqlain is playing for Sussex as a home player because of a British passport gained from marrying an English woman.
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In particular it survived the onslaught of the product of English mills backed by British firepower in those days of Empire.
And how does it cope with British, North American and Antipodean English?
Most French officials speak English and studied in British or American colleges.
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When qualified skipper Peter Herbert realised that 80% of professional boat captains in the Mediterranean were actually British, he decided to offer English weather forecasts, based on official French government data.
Some neat graphics on the Guardian website recently looked at trends over time and, not including the figure above, revealed a volatile picture in terms of English enthusiasm for the British badge.
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