Color, Colour, and the Man Who Wanted “Tung”
Most people assume that the gap between American and British spelling is very old, and that it is slowly getting wider. Neither idea holds up well. The differences are more recent than they feel, there are fewer of them than people think, and for the last fifty years the two versions of English have been moving towards each other rather than apart.
For most of its history, English was not spelled in any fixed way at all. Writers spelled by ear, printers spelled to fit the line, and the same name could appear three ways on a single page. Fixed spellings arrived late, and they arrived mainly through dictionaries. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1755 helped settle a great deal of British practice, and it tended to keep the French-looking forms — “colour”, “centre”, “catalogue” — because those were what educated writers were already using.
The American side was settled later still, and far more deliberately. Noah Webster, whose American dictionary appeared in 1828, believed that English spelling was needlessly difficult, and he simplified a small set of endings on purpose. The “-our” ending was cut to “-or”, “-re” was turned around to “-er”, the doubled letter in “travelled” was reduced to one, and a few final “-ue” endings were dropped. His spelling books were used in American schools for generations and his choices were copied by American printers, which is why a large part of today’s difference can be traced back to one determined man with a strong opinion.
It is worth noticing how little of what he wanted actually survived. Webster also argued for “tung”, “wimmen” and “iland”, and none of them was accepted; American children learn “tongue” and “women” exactly as British children do. What remains is a few dozen recurring patterns, almost all of them predictable once you know the rule.
Some famous differences are not really differences at all. The “-ize” ending is often called American, but it is older than the split and is still the house style of Oxford University Press, so a British scientist may perfectly correctly write “organize”. “Gotten”, which sounds unmistakably American, is an older English form that stayed in America after it largely faded in Britain. In that case the traffic ran the other way.
And the traffic has become much heavier. British speakers now say “movie” and “guys” without thinking about it, while American writing has quietly taken in “gone missing” and “spot on”. People who watch the same films, play the same games and read the same arguments online every day will end up sharing vocabulary, whatever their dictionaries say. The spellings stay where they are, because spelling is taught in school and defended by software, while the words themselves move freely.
Two hundred years of dictionaries changed how a few dozen words are written. Fifty years of shared screens have been changing which words people reach for at all, and that is by far the deeper kind of borrowing.