British Spelling

Fun Facts About American And British Spellings

• After the American Revolutionary War, there was a profound desire among the Founding Fathers and intellectual elite to supplement the political break with a cultural break. Language became a way to signal a new national identity.
• Noah Webster intentionally sought to simplify English spelling to establish a distinct American cultural identity independent from British conventions.
• Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language was widely adopted in American schools and quickly became the standard for U.S. spellings.
• Webster believed spelling should reflect pronunciation more closely. So he simplified spellings of words, removing silent letters wherever possible. For instance "plough" would become "plow."
• While Noah Webster successfully codified many American spelling conventions, there were a few that failed to catch on. For instance:
  • tung for tongue, one of his most famous failures. He said it should be spelled like lung
  • wimmin for women, a purely phonetic attempt to match the actual pronunciation of the plural
  • masheen for machine, an attempt to replace the French-influenced "ch" with a phonetic "sh"
  • thum for thumb, designed as an attempt to remove the silent "b"
  • dawter for daughter, designed as an attempt to remove the silent "gh"
• Early American printers were appreciative of the shorter spellings because they saved space and ink. These practical considerations in turn reinforced the spelling reforms.
• In the 18th century, British spellings were still in a state of flux. Americans "froze" some forms that Britain later changed, and vice versa.
• As public schooling expanded in the 19th century, textbooks in each country reinforced their respective spelling systems. This continued in the late-20th century, as modern spell-check systems in word processing software offered separate American and British settings.