An American Lexicographer Argued the Country Out of Its U's

After American independence the English language in the new United States was still spelled the way Samuel Johnson had spelled it in 1755: with the British U in colour, the British -RE in centre, and the British double L in traveller. Noah Webster, a Connecticut schoolteacher, decided this was a problem.

Webster's first move was a spelling book, the 1783 American Spelling Book, which sold tens of millions of copies and became known as the "blue-backed speller." In its preface he argued that an independent country needed an independent orthography — partly on national pride, partly on a more practical claim that English spelling was a mess and ought to be reformed phonetically anyway.

The full programme arrived in 1828, with An American Dictionary of the English Language. It contained 70,000 entries and a deliberately reformed set of spellings. Out went the U from honour, colour, favour. -RE became -ER in centre, theatre, fibre. The double L of traveller, jeweller, and woollen lost a letter. Defence kept its sound but switched to defense. Plough shortened to plow.

Not everything stuck. Webster also lobbied for wimmen, soop, tung, cloke, and masheen. Each appeared in his dictionary. Each failed in the marketplace.

The spellings that survived did so because Webster's dictionary became, for a generation of American printers, the reference of last resort. Newspapers picked up his choices, schools followed, and within fifty years the divergence between color and colour was a settled fact of two written Englishes — a small linguistic legacy of one man's view that political independence required orthographic independence too.