Blame Webster (Mostly)

Every Australian has had the experience. You open a document, type “colour”, and the software underlines it in red as if you’ve personally offended it. The spellchecker is American, and so is its idea of English.

Most people blame one man for that: Noah Webster.

Born in Connecticut in 1758, Webster was a schoolteacher, a lawyer, a political journalist and, above all, a patriot with a pen. In 1793, Alexander Hamilton and other Federalists put up the money for him to move to New York and edit a party newspaper. But his real campaign was in spelling. He believed a new nation deserved its own language, or at least its own spelling, free of what he saw as English fussiness. His American Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1828, and after his death the Merriam brothers bought the rights. That’s why the name on your American dictionary is still Merriam-Webster.

Some of his changes stuck. Colour became color, honour became honor and neighbour became neighbor. Centre became center, and defence became defense. Today they’re the reason a Melbourne marketing team argues about whether their brand guidelines are in “Australian” or “US” English.

Plenty of his ideas didn’t stick. Webster wanted tung for tongue, wimmin for women, masheen for machine and dawter for daughter. He also suggested iland, beleev, soop and ake. Logically, he had a point: English spelling is a mess. Practically, people won’t change how they write a word just because it makes sense. Webster was right about the mess and wrong about how much logic people will put up with.

Now for the part that’ll annoy you. Two of the changes usually blamed on Webster weren’t his.

First, tire. It’s actually the older English spelling. Tyre is the newer one, revived in Britain in the nineteenth century. When Americans write tire, they’re keeping the old form.

Second, the z. Endings like -ize come from Greek, where the original was spelled with a zeta, and English used -ize for centuries before Webster was born. The French-influenced -ise only became the British favourite later. The Oxford English Dictionary still uses -ize to this day: organize, realize, recognize. So does a lot of Oxford University Press’s own publishing. So if your spellchecker flags organize as American, it’s wrong.

Australia, for the record, went with -ise. That’s a perfectly good choice. It’s just not the ancient British tradition we sometimes think it is.

Spelling rules usually feel like they’ve been handed down from somewhere. Often, they were just decided by one stubborn person with a printing press.