Out of America -Harboring a grudge: the birth of US English

If we are two nations divided by a common language, as Shaw said, then Noah Webster is to blame

This is a season of American anniversaries. The most poignant and immediate of them comes tomorrow, exactly five years since that terrible morning when hijacked aircraft smashed into the World Trade Center in New York, and into the Pentagon, the Department of Defense building here in Washington. The attacks were the deadliest on US soil since Japan's assault on Pearl Harbor.

But another anniversary is also with us. Consider the above paragraph.

Should I have written World Trade Centre, not Center, and Department of Defence, not Defense? And should we be talking about Pearl Harbour, rather than Pearl Harbor? The confusion, for an English writer, may be laid at the door of one man: Noah Webster, lexicographer, teacher, journalist and patriot. He was America's equivalent of Samuel Johnson - and much else beside.

Exactly two centuries ago, in 1806, Webster published his Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. These days, we think of compendious as meaning embracing and comprehensive. But his definition was "brief, concise and summary", and his dictionary lived up to that. It measured barely six inches by four in its original edition, and contained a modest 37,000 entries.

For the first time, however, it set out a specifically American version of English, even listing some 5,000 words not found in dictionaries of the time in Britain. If a single individual could be blamed for George Bernard Shaw's alleged quip that America and England were "two countries divided by a common language", it is Webster.

Though he had nothing to do with the Declaration of Independence and was not among the authors of the US constitution, Webster was a revolutionary up there with the best of them. A new country needed its own distinctive language, he believed. The Dictionary (and a speller and grammar that he published in the 1780s) were thus explicitly aimed at providing an intellectual and linguistic foundation for American nationalism.

Webster considered that British English, with its weird constructions and bizarre spellings, reflected a country strangled by tradition, pedantry and privilege. In Britain at that time, he wrote, improvements of every kind were "cramped and retarded because the human mind like the body is fettered, bound fast by the cords of policy and superstition". In other words the people, not the elite, should determine how the language was spoken. Popular usage alone was what mattered, he declared, "and every deviation from this must be wrong". So Webster set about his task, to make the spelling match the phonetics.

Out went fuddy-duddy defence to be replaced by defense, and practice became practise. Webster took an axe to the u in words like colour, honour and humour. Musick and publick lost their k, gaol became jail, and centre turned into center.

Then there were the specifically American words he codified for the first time - and not just the names of creatures that didn't exist on the other side of the Atlantic, like possum and skunk. He enshrined such words as presidential and constitutionality that were specifically American, distinguishing the new republic from the old colonial monarchy run by unwritten custom and convention. Unlike Johnson, Webster gave equal weight to scientific terms - an emphasis which many might say distinguishes Americans from Englishmen to this day.

The changes could have been far worse, of course. If he'd had his way, a tongue would be a tung, and a sleigh, a sley. He also had to row back on wimmen: in the 1806 dictionary it had reverted to women. He tried to change ache to ake too, but Americans didn't buy that one either.

Webster went on writing dictionaries, and, as dictionaries tend to do, they got bigger. His two-volume American Dictionary published in 1828, 15 years before his death, had 70,000 words. But that is nothing compared to the latest Webster's Collegiate, today's standard dictionary of American English, with some 225,000 entries, among them new coinages like drama queen, googling, supersize and spyware.

He also produced an updated speller, which went on to become the most widely sold book of its age and the inspiration for that peculiar American tradition, the national schoolchildren's spelling competition, or spelling bee. A spelling what, you ask? No one knows - even though it has been around since the 18th century. A question, in other words, to which even Noah Webster had no answer.