British English is the English language as spoken and written in United Kingdom or, more broadly, throughout the British Isles. Slight regional variations exist in formal, written English in the United Kingdom. For example, the adjective wee is almost exclusively used in parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland, and occasionally Yorkshire, whereas little is predominant elsewhere. Nevertheless, there is a meaningful degree of uniformity in written English within the United Kingdom, and this could be described by the term British English. The forms of spoken English, however, vary considerably more than in most other areas of the world where English is spoken, so a uniform concept of British English is more difficult to apply to the spoken language. According to Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English, British English shares "all the ambiguities and tensions in the word British and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within a range of blurring and ambiguity." When distinguished from American English, the term "British English" is sometimes used broadly as a synonym for the various dialects of English spoken in some member states of the Commonwealth of Nations, excluding those which have separate and long-standardised dialects of their own such as Australia and Canada.

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