Before the invention of the printing press in the 1440s, books were {tooltip}luxury items{end-text}Producing a 300-page book would have cost around $20,000.{end-tooltip} meant only for the rich.<\/li>\n

While the books saw exponential growth in the 16th and 17th centuries, people didn\u2019t bother much about the spellings of the words.<\/li>\n

In fact, documents show that Shakespeare<\/a> during his lifetime (1564-1616) himself {tooltip}spelled his name in several different ways.{end-text}Schakespeire, Shakesspere, Shaxkpere, Shakysper, Shaxpeer, etc.{end-tooltip}<\/li>\n

However, gradually (by the mid-1500s) the demands for a set pattern of grammar, definition, and spelling began rising.<\/li>\n

While over {tooltip}150 dictionaries were published between 1538 and 1746{end-text} The 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 \u201ca generall<\/i> table [of eight thousand words] we commonlie<\/i> use…[yet] It [were] a thing verie<\/i> praiseworthy…if som<\/i> well learned…would gather all words which we use in the English tung<\/i>…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.{end-tooltip}, they were poorly organized and poorly researched and did a bad job at standardizing spellings.<\/li>\n

This dissatisfaction led to a few London booksellers contracting Samuel Johnson in 1746 to produce a dictionary that took 9 years to complete (1755).<\/li>\n

This dictionary took a few years to catch on and soon after it stoked public interest in spellings, etc., America\u2019s war of independence against Britain started (1775).<\/li>\n

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.<\/i><\/li>\n

The first book of the 3-volume compendium was about spellings and was published in 1783.<\/li>\n

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.<\/li>\n

His reasons were both nationalist (independent language for an independent country) and philological (for the sake of language).<\/li>\n

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.<\/li>\n

So, catalogue<\/em> changed to catalog, behaviou<\/em>r to behavior, organis<\/em>e to organize, etc.<\/li>\n

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.<\/li>\n

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 \u2018realise\u2019 was in 1755, while \u2018realize\u2019 first appeared in 1611.<\/li>\n

Not all the recommendations by Webster were adopted though; e.g. he wanted tongue to spell tung but it didn\u2019t quite stick.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n \r\n
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