bcw (07/11/82)
From: Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University Re: Noah Webster's language reforms I too heard that Noah Webster reformed the American spellings of various English words such as colour => color centre => center and so forth. Unfortunately this is not quite the way things happened. Recently I was curious about some of this and looked up some of the history of such words in the Oxford English Dictionary (the big un- abridged version); if any authority has an ax to grind about "improper American spelling" it would be this one. According to the Oxford dictionary, these spellings were taken as valid alternate spellings in England until Johnson published his dictionary in the late 18th century; in fact the use of "er" rather than "re" in words like centre vs center or theatre vs theater was preferred in Shakespeare's time even in England! It appears that what happened was that the language was simply evolving differently in the two countries, probably helped along by a certain desire to be different from "those monarchists" and "those anarchists." Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University