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I write in British English and occasionally I get an overfull hbox warning because LaTeX does not know how to break a word correctly in its British form. For example, the word 'analysing' causes an overfull hbox because LaTeX will not break the word, whereas 'analyzing' is broken into 'analyz-ing' and the hbox warning goes away. what is the best solution to this? Is there a way to have LaTeX recognise British English and correctly break words?

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    Did you forget to load the babel package? Otherwise, you will be using the default American hyphenation patterns which indeed do not break "analysing". You see which hyphens are allowed by \showhyphens{analysing} etc. and add new hyphenations with the \hyphenation command. Feb 24, 2013 at 13:43

1 Answer 1

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Load babel with the british option (simply using english won't work).

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[american,british]{babel}

\textwidth 30pt% just for the example

\begin{document}

xxx analysing

\selectlanguage{american}

xxx analysing

\end{document}​

enter image description here

EDIT: Here's a solution in case you're using XeLaTeX/polyglossia:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setmainlanguage[variant=british]{english}

\textwidth 30pt% just for the example

\begin{document}

xxx analysing

\end{document}​
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  • I did this and my biblatex-chicago package stopped working, so I loaded [american,british,english] as options for babel, which fixed it.
    – DavidR
    Feb 25, 2013 at 15:25

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