Why British English is different from American English.

I noticed a lot of (not native English-speaking) people do not know why there is such a difference between the British and the American spelling. Whereas this is actually very easily explained, since it is mostly because of one person named Noah Webster.

Imagine it is the late eighteenth century. Only a relatively small number of the population were fluent in reading and writing. Literacy was identified as being able to read and write the classic languages such as Greek and Latin, analyze literature, etc. Around this time there was no ‘standard English spelling’ on either side of the Atlantic. It was just somewhat the same everywhere, some words or accents came from all over the world at that time. A guy named Noah Webster was just trying to bring some standards to the situation. He was part of a new wave that wanted to educate the masses, and not from the British textbooks that were used at that time. Webster thought that the Americans should learn from American books. So he began writing a three volume compendium, ‘A Grammatical Institue of the English Language’. It consisted of a speller(1783), a grammar (1784), and a reader(1785).

He tried to simplify the language, to take away the silent letters and thus make the language more consistent and easier to read and write. For example, he changed the –ce from words like defence, offence and pretence to –se; abandoned the second, silent ‘l’ in verbs such as travel and cancel when forming the past tense; dropped the ‘u’ from words such as humour and colour; and dropped the ‘k’ from words such as publick and musick. The ‘publick’ readily accepted many of these changes and just as readily rejected some of the others (some words were even accepted across the Atlantic as official spelling).

So next time you make a spelling mistake just blame it on the language being too complicated and write a new dictionary including your new spelling. Perhaps they will accept it as well on the other side of the Atlantic. 

WEBSTER WON SOME:		...AND LOST SOME:
Before Webster	Webster's Change	Before Webster	Webster's Change
gaol	jail	ache	ake
mould	mold	soup	soop
travelled	traveled	sleigh	sley
honour	honor	sponge	spunge
centre	center	tongue	tung
humour	humor	cloak	cloke
masque	mask	determine	determin
publick	public	women	wimmen