Centralised or centralized?
In American English write centralized; in British and Commonwealth English, centralised. centralised is a verb meaning “simple past and past participle of centralise”; centralized is an adjective meaning “Having things physically towards the center; consolidated or concentrated”. In written English (wordfreq, 2021 data) centralized is about 3.5 times as common as centralised.
What is the difference between centralised and centralized?
| centralised | centralized | |
|---|---|---|
| Part of speech | adjective, verb | adjective, verb |
| Meaning | Having things physically towards the center; consolidated or concentrated Having power concentrated in a single, central authority | |
| Example | none recorded | none recorded |
| Pronunciation | not recorded | not recorded |
| Region | UK | no label |
| In writing | about once in every 1 million words | 3.0 times per million words |
Sources: centralised and centralized in the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Every current meaning of centralised and centralized
centralized
- 1
Having things physically towards the center; consolidated or concentrated
- 2
Having power concentrated in a single, central authority
- 3
Moved toward the center of the vowel space: [ë] is less front than [e], though not necessarily central; similarly, [ö] is less back than [o]
Source: the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); obsolete, archaic, dialect and rare senses left out.
Which is more common, centralised or centralized?
centralised appears about once in every 1 million words; centralized 3.0 times per million words.
centralised about once in every 1 million wordscentralized 3.0 times per million words
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How many people search centralised vs centralized?
“centralised vs centralized” is searched about 10 times a month on Google and 10 on Bing in the United States. Google counts close variants of a query together (“centralized vs centralised”, “centralised or centralized”).
Sources: Google Ads keyword data through DataForSEO and Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, the average month from September 2025 to August 2026.