title: Normalize British and American English for Elasticsearch
body: <p>Is there a best practice for normalizing British and American English in Elasticsearch?</p>
  
  <p>Using a <a href="http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/analysis-synonym-tokenfilter.html">Synonym Token Filter</a> requires an incredibly long configuration file. There are actually several thousand differently spelled words in UK and US English and it's almost impossible to find a really comprehensive list of words. Here's a <a href="http://www.tysto.com/uk-us-spelling-list.html">list of almost 2.000 words</a>, but it's far from being complete.</p>
  
  <p>Preferably, I'd like to create an ES Analyzer/Filter with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences">rules to transform US to UK</a> English. Maybe that's the better approach, but I don't know where to start - which type of filters do I need for that? It doesn't have to cover everything - it should merely normalize most search terms. E.g. "grey" - "gray", "colour" - "color", "center" - "centre", etc.</p>