Noah Webster’s Spelling Crusade: Why Americans dropped the ‘u’ and never looked back?

American English owes many of its unique spelling conventions to Noah Webster, an American lexicographer and the creator of the first American dictionary. In the early 19th century, Webster aimed to standardize American English and differentiate it from British English, reflecting the new nation's independence and identity.

Noah Webster - Not a factual picture,
but an AI-generated and then doctored picture  

Webster's Spelling Reform focused on simplifying and rationalising (or should I say rationalizing?) English spelling. His changes included dropping letters that he saw as unnecessary, such as the -u in colour (becoming color), and replacing complex endings like -ise with the more straightforward -ize, as seen in organize. These simplifications made spelling rules easier to learn, especially for the growing American population, according to some people.

Although not all of Webster’s reforms were adopted (he proposed even more radical changes that didn’t gain traction), his influence shaped many of the spelling differences that define American English today.

There is a number of patterns that define the differences between British English and American English (like the dropping of the 'u' and the '-ise' swap to '-ize' seen before), and also some unique words that do not follow any pattern. We are going to look at each of them separately.

Noah Webster on a US postage
stamp issued in 1958