Two great lexicographers, Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster

What are the most American and most British words? Is American English really that different than its British ancestor? And if so, what words truly separate the American from the Brit? The Department of Data is on the case. Washington Post (August 22, 2025), Column by Andrew Van Dam

Depending on the date and time when it appeared online, this article has a different title and format (e.g., fewer or more graphs / charts, but the textual content remains basically the same.  The published version is much longer than the extract I have given here, and provides much more data.

As recently as the roaring 1820s, the loose confederations of dialects that would become American and British English were almost equally colourful. But in 1828, Noah Webster’s “American Dictionary of the English Language”  hit shelves.  It came as a counterweight to Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary, which had helped anoint correct spellings in a language that traditionally took a devil-may-care approach to such things. Literally.  In her stellar “The Prodigal Tongue,”  linguist Lynne Murphy writes that the first folio of “Romeo and Juliet” “included three spellings of devil” and that none of them were d-e-v-i-l. Murphy, an American who has taught at the University of Sussex for the entirety of this millennium, might be the planet’s most devoted chronicler  of the dialects’ differences. And she’s spent endless hours digging into how they came about. Much of it goes back to Webster. He wasn’t impressed by British English, writing in 1789 that “Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline.” But Murphy told us his changes weren’t mere rebelliousness. “Americanization was certainly one of his goals, though he’s not going to change things just for the sake of them being different — he also wants to argue that they’re logically, pedagogically or etymologically better,” Murphy said.

Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, has been my lexical vade mecum since 1961.  I still keep it on my desk.

 

Selected readings

• "You Smell, I Stink" (7/15/11)
• "Samuel Johnson's birthday" (9/19/17)
• "Webster as an orthographic conservative?" (5/10/11)
• "Centuries of disgust and horror?" (3/16/09)

[Thanks to François Lang}