Noah Webster Hates 'U'

I struggled with spelling as a child. Back before we all used laptops in school and had smartphones, we would write out essays, and I had to carry around a spell check machine to try to help me spell any and every word. For example, I could never spell ‘machine’, so I’d pull out the spell check, which looked like a calculator and smelled like new rubber, and try to get close enough to ‘machine’ for the device to provide for me the actual spelling. In sixth grade, I was pulled out of my math class to take one-on-one spelling classes. The goal was to have me learn and understand the rules of spelling in English, and as a deep lover of rules, I would then know how to spell. It’s a nice idea, but unfortunately English spelling is an anarchist’s paradise. There are no rules, and the rules that do exist only do so to spit in your face when they don’t apply. Into this churning void stepped Noah Webster, a lexicography looking to impose his will on the untamed English language.

Noah Webster loved America. He went to law school, then started a private school and he took it upon himself to right the wrongs of Europe in America. When Webster looked to Europe, he saw nothing but rationality overcome by backward superstitions, saying: 

America sees the absurdities—she sees the kingdoms of Europe, disturbed by wrangling sectaries, or their commerce, population and improvements of every kind cramped and retarded, because the human mind like the body is fettered 'and bound fast by the chords of policy and superstition': She laughs at their folly and shuns their error…

These errors that America laughs at include errors in spelling. Webster looked at the English language and saw vestigial letters and spelling from a time before the light of reason illuminated the Earth. Why should ‘colour’ be spelled with a ‘u’ if it isn’t pronounced? Why would ‘re’ ever be pronounced as ‘er’ as in ‘center’? Webster laughed at these follies and shunned their error.

Noah Webster is the reason different spellings exist between American English and British English. He published his first dictionary in 1828 and it became the standard for correct spelling in America, while having almost no impact in England. To correct the errant ways of the Europeans, Webster dropped the ‘u’ from words like ‘colour’ and ‘honour’:

In American English, there is an inflection point for ‘color’ and ‘honor’ at 1828 where their usage spikes and both u-less spellings overtake their British counterparts in 1845.

The morally inferior British English sees no change in usage; ‘color’ and ‘honor’ remain in obscurity.

Similarly, Webster changed the spelling of words like ‘centre’, ‘fibre’, and ‘theatre’ to ‘center’, ‘fiber’, and ‘theater’ and the word ‘grey’ to ‘gray’.

Once again, Webster’s choice of spelling becomes the dominant spelling in American English in a fairly short period of time,

While his correct spellings languish in British English.

And this is why I could never spell anything right as a child. English is a weird amalgamation of several different languages. Because different words derived from different languages, the rules for spelling them are different. This is why language of origin is an important question in spelling bees. But then there are also things like Noah Webster. One man decided that the English spelling up to his day was wrong, so he changed it, and now we’re living in Noah Webster’s world. I read a lot of British books as a kid, so I picked up the British way of spelling ‘gray’ (‘grey’). When I turned in a paper with ‘grey’, I’d lose points for spelling ‘gray’ wrong. If I had known to ask why ‘gray’ is right and ‘grey’ is wrong, I would have only been further outraged by the answer I’d have received. American’s spell ‘gray’ with an ‘a’ because Noah Webster said so. How am I supposed to know that rule?

All this to say language is weird and wonderful. Most of the time, language shift occurs on a macro scale. Vowel sounds or spellings shift in the general population for seemingly no reason at all. What’s fun is to find the seams of language, where things don’t behave as they “should” and dig in. Sometimes there’s no good answer for why language changes as it does, but sometimes you can trace it back to one guy, publishing a dictionary in 1828.