Hello All,

I'm not from the UK. I'm following Chicago Style for references.

But I struggle to be consistent on UK style on various items. The university doesn't seem much fussed with this -- yet but I have a fiddly dissertation, with lots of 16th century texts and manuscripts etc., so with half the dissertation written I'm well aware that final proof/edit etc. will be a nightmare if I'm not good as I go along. So, I also don't want to struggle with having half the text say colonise, while elsewhere colonize, etc., and MS Word's spellchecker, no matter what I do, seems to accept American alternatives. (I thought I had the setting set to UK only, but it seems to revert on its own. I think it happens if I paste anything in from a document that wasn't set as UK language only. But I'm not sure. I think Bill Gates just wants to torture me.)

So, I've been keeping my own style sheet of recurring issues, and usually get guidance online. But it would be nice to have a UK equivalent of the Chicago Manual right at my desk. I've looked at Oxford, but its index is a mess, and I'm not planning to READ it right now, just want to be able to quickly get my hand on things like double and single quotation marks, or abbreviations for "signatures" in old books etc. Anyone know of a really credible, but easy to use source?