Before the invention of the printing press in the 1440s, books were luxury itemsProducing a 300-page book would have cost around $20,000. meant only for the rich.
While the books saw exponential growth in the 16th and 17th centuries, people didn’t bother much about the spellings of the words.
In fact, documents show that Shakespeare during his lifetime (1564-1616) himself spelled his name in several different ways.Schakespeire, Shakesspere, Shaxkpere, Shakysper, Shaxpeer, etc.
However, gradually (by the mid-1500s) the demands for a set pattern of grammar, definition, and spelling began rising.
While over 150 dictionaries were published between 1538 and 1746The first dictionary was published in 1538 but it was a short Latin-English wordbook than a comprehensive dictionary and did little for the spellings. Then in 1583, a dictionary was published which was described as “a generall table [of eight thousand words] we commonlie use…[yet] It [were] a thing verie praiseworthy…if som well learned…would gather all words which we use in the English tung…into one dictionary. The first monolingual (English-to-English) dictionary was published in 1604 but it contained only 2449 words and not a single word that started with W, X, or Y., they were poorly organized and poorly researched and did a bad job at standardizing spellings.
This dissatisfaction led to a few London booksellers contracting Samuel Johnson in 1746 to produce a dictionary that took 9 years to complete (1755).
This dictionary took a few years to catch on and soon after it stoked public interest in spellings, etc., America’s war of independence against Britain started (1775).
While America was fighting this war (which it won in 1783), Noah Webster (after whom Merriam Webster Dictionaries are named), was working on a three-volume compendium A Grammatical Institute of the English Language.
The first book of the 3-volume compendium was about spellings and was published in 1783.
Noah Webster was a teacher and wanted to provide an American approach to training children, who were, so far, studying from books brought in from England.
His reasons were both nationalist (independent language for an independent country) and philological (for the sake of language).
He believed that the English language was corrupted by excessive concern for minor details & rules, and wanted the words to spell closer to the way they sounded.
So, catalogue changed to catalog, behaviour to behavior, organise to organize, etc.
The differences that we see in British & American English today were first popularised by his work (between 1806 and 1828), but many of these different-from-British-English words existed much before he published them.
Shakespeare’s early works, for example, used spellings such as center and color as much as centre and colour; also, the first use of the word ‘realise’ was in 1755, while ‘realize’ first appeared in 1611.
Not all the recommendations by Webster were adopted though; e.g. he wanted tongue to spell tung but it didn’t quite stick.
