specialise

English

Etymology

From special +‎ -ise.

Pronunciation

  • Audio (General American):(file)

Verb

specialise (third-person singular simple present specialises, present participle specialising, simple past and past participle specialised)

  1. Non-Oxford British English standard spelling of specialize.
    • 1616, Richard Sheldon, A Survey of the Miracles of the Church of Rome, Proving Them to be Antichristian, section 261:
      Our Sauiour specialising and nominating the places in which these false prophets should teach his presence to be.
    • 1908 March 27, Pall Mall Gazette, 12/3:
      Firms... which have specialised in the manufacture of ‘heavies’...
    • 1945 January and February, T. F. Cameron, “Dock Working”, in Railway Magazine, page 9:
      Some centres specialise in timber, and those conveniently situated to the coalfields deal with large quantities of pit props.
    • 1980, Robert Dougall, AA Book of British Villages, Drive Publications Ltd, page 379:
      Jim is a nurseryman, specialising in clematis, and he has built up a business exporting 150 varieties to countries all over the world.
    • 2012 December 26, Patrick Butler and Abby Young-Powell, “Oily Cart company specialises in theatre for youngsters with complex disabilities”, in The Guardian[1], archived from the original on 29 November 2022:
      [Oily Cart] specialises in creating spectacular productions for young people with complex disabilities.
    • 2020 April 7, Peter Conrad, “Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu review – rebooting our reality”, in The Guardian[2], archived from the original on 14 June 2025:
      We now have good reason to question the pursuits of the vaunted innovators with whom Liu consorted in California – the blissed-out cultists at Google, whose only worry is over “the wrong kind of sparkling water in the microkitchens”, or the manic experts who specialise in “envisioning hyperplanes in n-dimensional space”.