[va] The word is considered an alternative spelling. For example if the dictionary was "en_US" the word "colour" is an alternative spelling for "color".
[*] The "Google Book Stats" are stats based on the counts from the 1-grams in Google's Books Ngram dataset for books between 1980 and 2008. The frequency count is without regard to case or dialect marks and does not include words with non-alphabetic characters. The newness figure is a rough approximation of how new a word is, the larger the number the newer the word. The "Should Include" score indicates if a word should or should not be considered for inclusion in the dictionary based on the frequency of the word in the corpus (1980-2008). A word with 5 stars (*****), that is not already in the dictionary, should most likely be included unless there is a good reason not to. A word with 3 stars (***) is still worth considering and a word with 1 star (*) should most likely not be considered. A report sorted by frequency is also available.

Mon Dec 7 20:14:35 2020 -0500 [5ef55f9]