How come 'ou' was reduced to 'o' in the US?

Question

Americans write color and favorite, when others say colour and favourite. How/why did this happen?

Answer 1

The pronunciation is the same, so you can't really say that some "say" this while others "say" that. It's strictly a spelling difference.

These are among the reforms introduced by Noah Webster in his dictionary, with a view towards (a) simplifying the spelling, and (b) creating a distinct American English. (The root forms of many of these words indeed lack the u - for example, Latin color, Italian favorito - so that may have been another motivation of his as well.) So these forms prevailed in the United States, while in the rest of the English-speaking world they kept the original spellings.

Answer 2

Not sure how to post a comment, but this is an interesting use of Google's Ngram Viewer. We can see that between 1840 and 1850 color overtook colour (using their American English dataset).

Answer 3

The reduction of 'our' to 'or' happens when the ending is unstressed (my accents on the stress):

cólour, flávour, hónour, néighbour, rúmour, lábour, húmour

but not when it is stressed

contóur, velóur, paramóur, troubadóur

This is very well explained (surprise) in Wikipedia

Answer 4

I have heard an alternate explanation - Newspaper reporters would telegraph their stories to the main office for inclusion in the paper. Saving space and reducing the cost of the transmission was important so editors issued a decree to drop 'useless letters' from spelling. Since newspapers were the most distributed mass written product to all levels of American society the spellings they used became the standard.

I have some problems with this - for one I've had a hard time verifying it, for another - I thought telegraph operations were charged by the word - not the letter. From some experience (now 30 years ago - who sends telegraphs now ??) there was a 10 character limit on a word - over 10 characters you got charged for 2 words. Was this the case in the mid 1800's - who knows.

Update: It seems that instincts were correct in questioning this. Both snopes and various fact-checking websites confirm it's a myth.

I would imagine the actual answer is some compound of all of the formal attempts to simplify, common usage and general evolution.

Answer 5

This is a much less clear-cut matter than most people seem to think. The spelling favorite was definitely in common use in London in the late 18th century. I have before me a bound volume of music containing the following titles and descriptions:

"THE PETITION, a Favorite Hymn, The Music by Luke Proctor Esqr." (1791 - c.1802) "Wm. Parke's MILITARY RONDO, Taken from his Favorite Oboe Concerto" (c1797 -1825) "My Song shall be of Mercy, a Favorite Solo Anthem Composed by the late Mr. James Kent" (1798 - c.1801) "HEAR HEAR MY PRAYER, a Favorite Anthem for Two Voices, Composed by the late Mr. James Kent" (1798 - c.1801) "Angels ever bright and fair, A favorite Song by Mr. Handel, in Theodora" (1798 - c.1802) "The Favorite Air of HOLY HOLY LORD... Composed by Mr. Handel" (1782 - 1798) "A Favorite and Compleat PEAL ON EIGHT BELLS Consisting of 350 Changes Rung by the College Youths Composed by Mr. Webb Printed and Sold by A. Bland No. 23 Oxford Street " (before 1792) [The composition is false, but that's another issue!]

None of the copies is dated, but they all bear publishers' names and addresses. The dates I give are taken from "Music Publishing in the British Isles" by Humphries & Smith (Basil Blackwell, 1970).

I also have unpublished manuscripts written by my paternal grandfather (b. 1868), an educated Englishman who used the favorite spelling as a matter of routine.

Of more concern to me personally is the increasing tendency of British writers to hold a superstitious belief that every -or spelling should have -our instead, giving rise to such monstrosities as "Humourous" "Glamourous" "Vapourise" and so on.

Answer 6

Looking at the graph posted by William, considering that the US-Mexican war started about 1845 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848 (with occupation by US of some Mexican lands, with Mexicans included), and given that "color" and "favorito" are the Spanish spelling for color and favorite, I would say that Spanish had an influence in the current American spelling of those words.

Answer 7

These are all good answers, but I think I have a more likely one.

Scholars in America, the men who influenced politics and academics in the US after the American Revolution were heavily influenced themselves by Latin and Greek sources: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, for example, were well versed in both and at universities like Harvard and William and Mary studying classical literature was an important part of the curriculum. Noah Webster was a Yale graduate and would have been very familiar with both the local vernacular and have had some knowledge of writers like Aristotle and Virgil and Aurelius. Webster often took into consideration the source of a word, and so often kept to Latin: honorus, colorus, and favorum became honor, color, and favor. He dropped the more complex lettering of Greek based words in favor of the way the Romans would have written it in part because it would have made it much more easy for the man who couldn't afford university to read, with only a few rare exceptions: the word for a doctor that specializes in the human skeleton is an orthopedist in American English and a doctor that might examine you when you are pregnant is a gynecologist. A wine lover is an oenophile, not an œnophile.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Britain's upper class had fallen in love with French. Peppering your speech with French was a sign of education; During this time the British were heavily into international trade and French was its lingua franca. Paris had a very strong hold on the arts and culture as well to the point that people were dumping older words like "fall" for "autumn" and "napkin" for "serviette", and it was this that Johnson took into account when he wrote the dictionary, plus keeping more of the Greek glyphs that often pop up in scientific or technical words (for the doubters out there, look at Kit Marlowe: had an Oxford University education, but he never in a million years would have used the œ and æ of Greek when all he had was the then 24 letters of the English alphabet. He WAAAAAY predates Johnson and though he worked within a system where anything goes in terms of spelling, he was pretty consistent in using only the letters of the English alphabet to spell words of Greek origin, even if he knew the other way, because only a handful of people would have understood it. Johnson changed that and wrote in a time and place where more people could read, so did not bother.)