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Honor, flavor, color, in fact a lot of words such as these are different, too. In Britain they would be honour, flavour and colour and offense, license and defense are offence, licence and defence in Britain.

So, why do we spell differently? After all, American English is derived from the early British colonists who, presumably, spelled words the same as their cousins across the Atlantic. The answer, it seems, comes down to two men who were born 50 years and an ocean apart.

The first was an Englishman, Samuel Johnson, who was born in the city of Lichfield, England, in 1709. Apparently, Johnson was a child prodigy who could read by the age of 3. He excelled at school, but his father had large debts and he had to work to help support his family. His situation changed somewhat when he was 19 and his mother received an inheritance. This enabled him to go to Oxford University to continue his studies, and it was here that he wrote his first poem in Latin.

Extremely well read and proficient in several languages, Johnson found himself in the city of Birmingham in 1732 and it was there that he was involved with the writing and production of its first newspaper, the Birmingham Journal.

From Birmingham, Johnson moved to London where, once more finding himself penniless, he held various jobs. Among these were writing assignments for Edward Cave, a publisher who, among other things, invented the word �����Ƶ�magazine.�����Ƶ� At times, Johnson lived on the streets because he had no money but he kept writing and, in 1746, his talents were recognized by a group of publishers led by William Strahan. They gave him a contract worth 1,500 guineas to produce a definitive dictionary of the English language. Enthusiastic, Johnson said it would take him three years. His estimate was optimistic; working with several assistants, it took him eight years but, in April of 1755, it was done. The finished product, �����Ƶ�A dictionary of the English Language,�����Ƶ� was big, measuring 18 inches by 20 inches when it was opened. It contained 42,773 entries and sold for what today would be about $500. It wasn�����Ƶ�t the first English dictionary, nor did it have the most words, but, at the time, it was deemed to be the best.

Johnson�����Ƶ�s dictionary was three years old when, on today�����Ƶ�s date in the year 1758, a boy was born in West Hartford, Connecticut. He was named Noah Webster after his father, who was a descendant of a governor of the colony as well as being a captain of militia, a church deacon and a founding member of the area book society.

Webster was home schooled by his mother, but then began his formal education in a small, one-room schoolhouse. He later described the teachers there as the �����Ƶ�dregs of humanity.�����Ƶ� At 14, he began to learn Latin and Greek and, two years later, he was enrolled in Yale. While he was there, the Revolutionary War broke out and he volunteered for the Connecticut Militia, although there doesn�����Ƶ�t appear to be any record of him taking part in major actions. The four years he spent at Yale were financed by his father mortgaging the family farm but, after graduating, Webster had little contact with them.

Graduating in 1779, Webster taught school for a while before quitting in order to study law. He passed the bar in 1781, but, with the war still raging, there were few opportunities for a newly qualified young lawyer to make a living, so he founded a small school. This enterprise didn�����Ƶ�t last long and he supported himself by writing articles in support of the war and proposing complete separation from Britain.

He wasn�����Ƶ�t finished with education, however, and soon opened another school in Goshen, New York. He wasn�����Ƶ�t happy with the education system in elementary schools, and so he set out to write three books that he called �����Ƶ�A Grammatical Institute of the English Language.�����Ƶ� The books were a speller, a grammar and a reader and he wrote them using the concept that Americans should have education based on the way they used the language and not the way it was spoken and spelled across the ocean.

The speller in particular turned out to be a best seller; in the 100 years after its publication, it sold 60 million copies. The early sales enabled Webster to work on his next project and, in 1806, he produced �����Ƶ�A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language.�����Ƶ� Once again, he wasn�����Ƶ�t satisfied, and the next year he began work on another dictionary.

This one was to take him 26 years to complete. He absorbed a working knowledge of some 28 different languages and adopted spellings and pronunciation that were in common use in America. Perhaps surprisingly, Webster finished the project in 1828 whilst living in the city of Cambridge in England. The end result was a dictionary with over 70,000 words, 12,000 of which had never before appeared in a dictionary. They were American words, spelled the American way, and the book was called �����Ƶ�An American Dictionary of the English Language.�����Ƶ� It was the forerunner of today�����Ƶ�s Webster�����Ƶ�s dictionary.

George Bernard Shaw is credited with saying Britain and America are two nations separated by a common language. That may be true. We use the same words and phrases and, in the main, they have the same meaning in both countries. We may pronounce many of them differently and we certainly spell a lot of them in different ways, but we can still understand one another. Long may it remain so.