Quote Originally Posted by gilmore View Post
It's not that they were poor spellers, it was that there was no correct way to spell things until Noah Webster and the other dictionarists in the early 1800's. Until then, everyone spelled words as they sounded to them.
Noah Webster, though, wrote his dictionary to create a distinctly American language which was distinctive from "British English" as well as uniform across the nation.

That's why Americans spell "honour", "colour", etc. incorrectly.

T.