Samuel, Norman, and Noah

Sunday Essay

Engraving after Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds (public domain) - Noah Webster, steel engraving, c. 1867 (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. cph 3b47136)

Yesterday, I wrote to my friend and fellow Substacker

c.d. mudge

, and spontaneously tossed a “u” into my American spelling of the word honor. I did this as a nod to my recipient’s reader’s eye, with the added benefit of annoying the editor in Word. I then realized that, if anyone had asked, I had no idea why the spelling differences exist between our two forms of English, except a vague recollection about some American writer’s wanting to be not-English after the American Revolution. Not something I could explain, defend, or believe with just a distant feeling, and not something I could abide for more than another cup of coffee. So…please bear with me as I hop around a bit in history in order to tell the story of how these differences came to be.

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There are several theories bandied about, including one stating that in the early days of the United States, the presence of extra letters increased publishing costs. Rubbish, I say, in my best RP. This is an urban legend which falls apart under scrutiny.

With very few exceptions, such as

• honour/honor and

• dropping the ligatures œ and æ as in fœtid/fetid and orthopaedic/orthopedic,

spelling differences do not change the number of letters; for example,

• centre/center, practise/practice, analyse/analyze.

In fact, some American versions have more letters than their UK counterparts, as in learnt/learned and dreamt/dreamed.

So, why and how did we end up with different ways of spelling the same word?

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Samuel

Before the initial thirteen colonies declared independence from England in 1776, English writer Samuel Johnson had compiled a 1755 publication called A Dictionary of the English Language, “In which the words are deduced from their originals, and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers.” It was a monumental task, taking him nine years to compile, with only a handful of clerks to assist him.

It is not as if there were no dictionaries before Johnson’s, but they:

• were bilingual, e.g., Latin–English

• were, even if not bilingual, given to inconsistencies of purpose, such as extended essays on a single word

• often listed only one or several synonyms instead of a definition

• did not list different senses of a word

• were limited only to difficult or unusual words, omitting commonly used words

• did not include etymologies

Johnson’s Dictionary, as it was often called, attempted—and in large part succeeded—in resolving all of the above vagaries and inconsistencies, remaining the foremost reference work for more than a century until the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1884. Astoundingly, the first edition of the OED credited more than 1,700 definitions to Johnson, with simply “J.”¹

(Incidentally, the The Dictionary of the English Language is a free online copy using images of the original dictionary; and although not searchable per se, it is navigable to any page through listed guide words. A fascinating rabbit hole for the curious!)

Title page of Samuel Johnson's 1755 publication of "A Dictionary of the English Language" (image taken from source in the public domain)

Why was this dictionary so pivotal?

There was no standardization for the language at that point in time. In the words of Johnson himself:

Excerpt from Johnson's preface to "A Dictionary of the English Language"

When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection; adulterations were to be detected, without a settled test of purity; and modes of expression to be rejected or received, without the suffrages of any writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority.

Norman

A scene from the Bayeux Tapestry depicting Bishop Odo rallying Duke William's army during the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (Bayeux Museum)

With the Norman conquest in 1066, Anglo-Norman French became the language of government and of the nobility. Old English was still used by the population, but French words made their way into the vernacular. Over the next centuries, as England’s lands in France declined, so did the use of Anglo-Norman French until English once again gained footing as the language of government, and indeed, literature—Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were written between 1387 and 1400 in what had become Middle English. Now it makes sense why British English favours words ending in -our and -re, as in labour, centre and theatre.

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Noah

In 1607, settlers brought Early Modern English with them to Jamestown, in the new colony of Virginia. Ensuing waves of settlers used what was still a very non-standardized written language. Enter Johnson’s 1755 dictionary which was used on both sides of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, as often happens with geographical separation, English in the colonies absorbed influences from Spanish (coyote²), French (colonel), Dutch (cookie³) and dozens of indigenous languages (see third bullet point below).

Enter Noah Webster. Born in West Hartford, Connecticut in 1758, Noah was raised in the years leading up to the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence having been signed in 1776. He was a fervent educational reformer and stalwart supporter of a distinct American culture, and although it is often thought that he originated the differences in spelling to demonstrate this, the various endings found in colour/color, for example, had already been in widespread use, sometimes simultaneously, by others—including Shakespeare.⁴ What Noah Webster did in his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language published in 1806, was:

• standardize a consistent use of endings which were simpler and looked closer to how words were pronounced

• create detailed and deeply-researched etymologies from his knowledge of 26 languages, including Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit, which he learned specifically for his work as a lexicographer

• include words from indigenous languages woven into American English, such as skunk, squash, hickory, bayou, Iowa, Huron, Montauk, Yuma, Natchez, Miami

• foster an American use of idiom, pronunciation, and style

• include technical terms for the arts and sciences, rather than literature only

A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language published in 1806

Upon publication of this reference, Noah Webster immediately set to work on his signal opus, the American Dictionary of the English Language (ADEL), which was not published until 1828 when he was seventy years old. It included 70,000 entries, and became the new standard by which future dictionaries would be written.

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There you have it from the nerdiest verbihund ever, who used to collect dictionaries from thrift shops, used book stores, and yard sales until the need for downsizing thinned the stacks. The short version of why the different spellings exist could have been boiled down (if a person were not otherwise curious) to French/not French. But at the Verbihund Café, the persistent question remains “why?” and so the nerd-scope must encompass history, sociology, literature, lexicography, morphology, publishing, education, geography…

There is much more to know, so if you are curious, there are links below. If nothing else, I recommend putzing around The Dictionary of the English Language site, which is very cool. There is a lot more to all of this, as I spent the entire day extricating myself from one really deep rabbit hole after another; twenty five tabs and fifteen articles later, it was my cat who shamed me into wrapping this up by sitting just to the right of my laptop and laser-staring at me until I realized that it was dark, well past his dinner time, and I was being a bad cat mom. Saint Tuxifer, the Unfed.

Thank you for chilling at the Verbihund Café on what is now

☘️☘️☘️ Saint Patrick’s Day! ☘️☘️☘️

In honor thereof, here are two bonzer phrases I found courtesy of The Irish Times

Is minic a bhris béal duine a shrón – It is often that a person’s mouth broke his nose

Is fánach an áit a bhfaighfeá gliomach – What an odd place to find a lobster (that is, It’s a small world)

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Sources

https://www.oxfordinternationalenglish.com/differences-in-british-and-american-spelling/

https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2017/09/08/american-british-english-spelling/

https://www.berlitz.com/blog/british-english-vs-american-english-spelling-pronunciation-words

https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/blog/about-johnsons-dictionary/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language#/media/File:Close_up_Samuel_Johnson_Folio_and_Abridged_dictionaries_%E2%80%93_letter_M.JPG

https://www.spellingsociety.org/history#/page/3

https://www.merriam-webster.com/about-us/americas-first-dictionary#:~:text=Noah%20Webster%20and%20America's%20First%20Dictionary&text=In%201806%20Webster%20published%20A,the%20first%20truly%20American%20dictionary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster%27s_Dictionary#Noah_Webster's_American_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language

https://linguafonica.com/blog/how-did-american-english-become-different-from-british-english/#:~:text=The%20American%20dictionary%20was%20put,a%20way%20of%20showing%20independence.

1. Young, Beth Rapp. “Guide to Dictionary.” Johnson’s Dictionary Online, 2021. Accessed March 16, 2024. https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/guide.php

2. The word coyote came to English through Mexican Spanish from the Nahuatl word coyōtl in the mid-1700s. Prior to that time, many Europeans simply called the native North American canines wolves.

3. from Dutch koekje "little cake”

4. In William Shakespeare's first folios, for example, spellings such as center and color are the most common.