Why everyone’s talking about... American English

CONTROVERSY engulfed the Wordle puzzle last week when its solution was ‘favor’, below. The u-less US spelling sparked uproar, with one fan joking: ‘It’s otrageos.’

But why do Americans spell differently? Or should that be ‘wrongly’?

It’s largely down to one man, Noah Webster, who compiled the first American dictionary. He had a political agenda: writing in 1783, he said he wanted to correct the linguistic ‘defects’ caused by the ‘ignorance and caprice’ of the recently deposed British. He initially denounced those who altered spellings ‘by expunging the superfluous letters’ – citing ‘favor’ as an example – but was soon at it himself.

Did he simply invent spellings?

No, he just chose simpler, older, or more logical spellings where there were alternatives. For example, ‘center’ was a spelling most English writers, including Shakespeare, had used until Samuel Johnson picked up the relatively obscure ‘centre’ for his influential 1755 dictionary. Webster also chose ‘s’ over ‘c’ in words like ‘defense’ because of their adjectives (‘defensive’, not ‘defencive’). But he was hardly consistent: alongside ‘favor’ he listed ‘warriour’.

Could he have gone further?

He wanted to! Other proposals such as dropping final ‘e’s (eg ‘fugitiv’) or silent letters (eg ‘fether’) never caught on. He also wanted ache to be ‘ake’, ‘groop’ for group, ‘wimman’ for woman, and ‘waz’ and ‘iz’ for was and is.

What about other linguistic differences?

Some arose as Britain became enamoured with all things French in the Victorian era. We changed ‘program’ to ‘programme’ and ‘check’ to ‘cheque’, while America kept the originals. Similarly, ‘fall’ (for autumn), ‘faucet’ (tap), ‘diaper’ (nappy) were common in England at the time of the Pilgrim Fathers but fell out of use here.

Whose words are winning?

America has 330million citizens, the UK 67million. You do

the math.