Every time an American types color and a Briton types colour, both are casting votes in a war declared more than two centuries ago by a cantankerous Connecticut schoolmaster. The transatlantic spelling divide is not the product of slow drift or printers' accidents. It was designed, argued for in pamphlets, and pushed through classrooms by one man — Noah Webster — who believed that a nation which had just fought free of Britain's king should not remain shackled to Britain's dictionary.
Webster was born in West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1758, and studied at Yale while the Revolutionary War raged around it. Teaching school after the war, he bridled at American children learning their letters from British textbooks. His answer, in 1783, was The American Spelling Book, known ever after from its binding as the blue-backed speller. It became one of the bestselling books in American history — sales over the following century are estimated in the tens of millions, and it is often said that only the Bible outsold it. For generations, American children learned to read, pronounce and spell from Webster, which is precisely why his private preferences could become a nation's habits.
For Webster, spelling was politics by other means. A new republic, he argued, needed its own standard of language as a band of national union, as distinctive as its constitution. He found encouragement in Benjamin Franklin, who had drafted a phonetic alphabet of his own in 1768 and passed the reforming torch to the younger man. Webster toured the young states lobbying legislatures to protect his speller — work that helped push through America's earliest copyright laws, a sideline that outlasted many of his spellings. In his Dissertations on the English Language of 1789, Webster made the case in full: strip out the silent letters, regularise the absurdities, and let American spelling declare its independence on the page.
What stuck
The programme reached full flower in his dictionaries — a Compendious Dictionary in 1806, and then, in 1828, An American Dictionary of the English Language, with roughly 70,000 entries, published when its author was sixty-nine and claimed to have studied more than twenty languages in preparation. The reforms that stuck are now the signature of American English: -our trimmed to -or, giving color, honor and labor; -re flipped to -er in center and theater; defence and offence respelled with an s; the doubled l dropped from traveller; plough pared down to plow; waggon to wagon; draught to draft. A few of his tidyings echo changes Britain was already making on its own — the final k of musick and logick was dropping out of British usage from the late eighteenth century, and nobody on either side of the Atlantic now writes them. And the American fondness for -ize endings is not purely his doing: Oxford's own house style has long preferred organize to organise.
What didn't
Then there are the reforms that died on the page. Webster proposed tung for tongue, wimmen for women, soop for soup, aker for acre, masheen for machine, iland for island, dawter for daughter and thum for thumb. Reviewers jeered, satirists feasted, and the reading public simply declined to follow. Webster himself retreated, quietly dropping the wilder spellings from his later editions. The pattern has held for every spelling reformer since: orthography can be nudged at the margins, but the core is immovable, because practised readers recognise familiar words the way they recognise faces — and a rearranged face looks wrong, whatever the logic behind it.
Why did Webster succeed even partially, when almost every other reformer in the language's history failed outright? Timing and distribution. British norms had themselves hardened only recently — Samuel Johnson's dictionary of 1755 had enshrined the French-flavoured -our and -re endings — so the cement was still wet enough to take a mark. More importantly, Webster owned the schoolroom: his speller and dictionaries delivered his spellings directly to children, teachers and printers, decade after decade. There are pleasing ironies in the outcome. Several supposed Americanisms are in fact older British spellings that Britain later abandoned — tire predates tyre, which Britain revived only in the nineteenth century, and gaol lingered in British print for generations before jail won there too — so on some words the junior partner is the conservative one.
Webster died in 1843, and the brothers George and Charles Merriam bought the rights to his great dictionary — a transaction preserved in the name Merriam-Webster today. His dream of a fully rational orthography failed, as such dreams always do; his flag-planting succeeded beyond any reformer before or since. Every color, center and defense on an American page is a small monument to the proposition that even spelling can be an act of independence.
Quiz nuggets
- Noah Webster's blue-backed speller of 1783 sold tens of millions of copies and taught generations of American children to spell.
- His An American Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1828 with roughly 70,000 entries.
- Webster reforms that stuck include color, honor, center, theater, defense, traveler, wagon, plow and draft.
- Failed Webster proposals included tung for tongue, wimmen for women, masheen for machine and iland for island.
- After Webster's death in 1843, George and Charles Merriam bought the dictionary rights — the origin of Merriam-Webster.