Re: Why do people in the UK put a u in the word color?
Hodgins Family wrote:
> Note - Originally the spelling of 'colour' without a U was a
> sanctioned change of the Spelling Reformist Movement, which was not
> exculsively accepted by Americans, but was much more popular in the US
> than it was in England. Henceforth, when the movement died out, its
> changes remained in US English but not in UK English. Not all American
> English spellings are from these changes, 'aluminum' for example, was
> introduced by Noah Webster. Nowadays, 'color' is a US English spelling.
The thirteenth element seems to be the catalyst for a great deal of
spelling disinformation. It is well-documented that Humphry Davy's
original proposed name for the element was "alumium", and that he later
settled on "aluminum" in order to maintain consistency with the name of
the already-known compound alumina.
The shift to "aluminium" only came about because an anonymous writer
proposed that the lengthier spelling had a more "classical" sound. One
may conclude that the names for platinum, tantalum, and molybdenum were
not also revised at this time due to those metals' inherent lack of
classicity.
Installing both text/wamerican-huge and text/wbritish-huge should shield
the casual user against the effects of this issue.
cmr
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