A familiar quiz question is "How many esses are there in 'Mississippi'?" [for which one answer could be 'None, but a lot of boats and fish'].

That being the case, it's reasonable to want to know how to spell "esses" [my answer there.]


just to enlarge on one other point. The trouble with American English being the usual basis of computers is that, unless you know how to do otherwise, when you type English English, the computer [which is always right] tells you you are wrong, wrong noch, when you put in English spelling.

I experience that occasionally only in emails. There is some facility for changing the basis to English English but I'm enough of a technophobe not to have found it yet.