Language

What I Like About American English

An open letter to our friends across the pond.

Nancy Friedman
5 min readAug 25, 2024

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Home grown: “An American Dictionary of the English Language,” by Noah Webster (1828)

Dear Brits,

Great little country you’ve got there! Love your history, your literature, your Daniel Craig. And, of course, your language, which you generously shared with us North Americans when you crossed the Atlantic in those rickety little ships.

But may I speak candidly? We’ve had a few centuries to tinker with English, and, well, we’ve made some improvements. Trimmed a little here, changed some spelling there, preserved some useful traditions everywhere. You could learn a thing or two from us!

For example:

We cut out the U’s.

British English picked up the u in words like colour, armour, and savour from French couleur, armeure, and saveur, which came to the British Isles with the Norman Invasion. That was in 1066. By 1806, when Noah Webster compiled his the first “compendious” American dictionary, he dispensed with Frenchiness, paring down English spelling to its practical basics: humour became humor, draught became draft, plough became plow.

By the way, the peculiar British preference for Frenchy -ou- spellings is so strong that it’s given rise to faux-French spellings like neighbour (originally…

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Nancy Friedman
Nancy Friedman

Written by Nancy Friedman

Writer, name developer, brand consultant, idea-ist, ex-journalist. @fritinancy on Mastodon, Instagram, Bluesky, Threads, and elsewhere.

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