How Spelling Became Standard — And What if Left Behind
Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: Crayons, Clocks, and Spelling Tests: The Human Stories Behind Everyday School Subjects
This week’s focus: Historical Literacy, or helpful frameworks to expand how we approach history and identity.
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1100 words, an estimated 4-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
This month, we’re uncovering the hidden stories behind everyday school subjects — those lessons so common in elementary or secondary school that we may rarely stop to ask how they came to be “correct” in the first place.
Take Spelling, for example. It might seem like a simple matter of rules, something you memorize just before taking a test or participating in a spelling bee.
Maybe you remember sitting at a desk, pencil in hand (I still remember how the freshly sharpened wood smelled), listening as the teacher slowly said a word, used it in a sentence, and repeated it — while you carefully jotted it down, letter by letter.
But if we lived in Shakespeare's time, words could have many spellings. The word “love,” for example, could have been spelled in different ways: love, loue, luve, and luv — and all might've been accepted. Writers spelled words as they sounded, based on regional preferences or personal style.
In the last few hundred years, however, English spelling went through a process of standardization.
So, who decided what became the “correct" way to spell? Why would that even matter?
There’s a bigger story here, one that shows how humans create order out of chaos, how language connects to identity and power, and how tiny marks on a page carry centuries of culture, conflict, and sometimes surprising connection.
The First English “Spelling Tests”
English is notoriously tricky to spell, and there are historical reasons for that.
English is a language built from layers: Germanic roots in Old English, Latin influence from Christian missionaries, French reshaping after the Norman Conquest. Each wave added new sounds, unfamiliar letters, and plenty of spelling quirks.
In the 1400s to 1700s, English underwent a dramatic change in pronunciation known as the “Great Vowel Shift.” Vowels took on different sounds, yet some of the spelling stayed the same.
Around the same time, the invention of the printing press spurred a boom in written materials, and with it, a push for consistent spelling.
Over the subsequent centuries, printers and dictionary-makers tried to bring order to inconsistent spellings. The idea of “correct” spelling took root.
Who Got to Decide What Was “Correct”?
While Samuel Johnson didn’t publish the world’s first dictionary, his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language made a massive impact on the English-speaking world — both literally and figuratively.
It took Johnson nearly a decade to write. The finished product stood 18 inches tall, weighed more than 20 pounds, and included over 42,000 words. Though it helped codify English spelling at a time when variation was the norm, the book was expensive for its time. Johnson’s dictionary cost about 4 pounds and 10 shillings, the equivalent of hundreds of pounds today.
Around the same time, Anne Fisher — an educator and grammar expert — published her own guides, helping to make formal education more accessible at a time when it was largely reserved for men of wealth and status.
Across the Atlantic, Noah Webster took a different approach.
After the American Revolution, Webster believed that the newly formed United States needed its own language or a distinct spelling system that could help forge an “American identity.” He famously simplified or changed many British spellings: “colour” became “color,” “centre,” became “center.” He even invented new words.
Webster’s dictionaries helped to standardize American English. But it was more than just changing letters. It was about who gets to decide what “correct” means. By shaping standardized American English, Webster’s work also marginalized Indigenous and regional dialects, immigrant speech patterns, and cultural expressions that didn’t fit the narrow mold.
Noah Webster declared: “Nothing but the establishment of schools and some uniformity in the use of books can annihilate differences in speaking, and preserve the purity of the American tongue. As an independent nation our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.”
What Constitutes “Correct”?
While spelling standardization can support literacy, a push for uniformity can also delegitimize, marginalize, or even attempt to erase other ways of speaking, overlooking the nuance of a nation or diverse group of humans and their systems of language, such as:
African American Vernacular English (AAVE), which largely developed through the 18th and 19th centuries, and blended English with West African linguistic patterns.
Hundreds of Native Nations had — and continue to have — oral languages with diverse phonetic systems. Some were so sophisticated, like Choctaw and Navajo, that they were used as unbreakable codes during World War II.
Immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and other countries across Eastern Europe carried varied accents and speech patterns, but were often labeled as “non-American,” or “foreign,” with social pressure angling for assimilation.
Distinct dialects from Appalachia, the American South, and other regions were often dismissed as “nonstandard,” as northeastern urban dialect became the de facto norm.
The dominance of one language or spelling system is not unique to the United States. Colonial forces have shaped other communities around the world. To name two examples:
In East Africa, Swahili was written in Arabic script for centuries before colonial powers enforced Latin script in schools.
In India, British colonization suppressed local scripts and languages, like Tamil and Bengali, by enforcing English in education and government.
Spelling isn’t just about rules. It’s a glimpse into how societies organize knowledge, wield power, and shape identity.
What looks like a simple spelling word can hold stories of migration, control, resilience, and whose voices get passed on through time.
Who gets remembered.
Language Persists and Evolves
Language isn’t frozen. It adapts, shifts, and — with intention — survives.
Across the world, many Indigenous and local communities are working tirelessly to preserve, reclaim, and revitalize their linguistic heritage. To name just a few examples:
In New Zealand, the Māori people have led a successful language revitalization movement, including Kōhanga Reo, language immersion schools that begin in infancy.
In the U.S., the Wôpanâak (Wampanoag) Nation is reclaiming a language that hasn’t been offered in a “school setting” for 200 years, through the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project.
The Sámi people of northern Europe are working across borders to sustain the use of the Sámi language and culture through advocacy, education, and preservation.
In South Africa, critically endangered languages, like Khoekhoe, are being documented using digital tools and oral history projects.
Across Asia, efforts to preserve Adivasi languages, Classical Tamil and endangered Himalayan languages include school inclusion, digital storytelling, and community-led preservation projects.
Even today, new words continue to emerge. Texting shapes spelling and grammar. Language continues to evolve, perhaps faster than ever, with global reach.
So what would a spelling test look like 100 years from now? And who will decide what counts as “correct”?
Will it (or might it) it take a form we have yet to imagine?