Quote:
Originally Posted by bacalaopeace
It goes back to Samuel Johnson, who preferred French to Latin.
No, 'colour' came into English from French and usually had the U. Shakespeare, as originally published and printed, wasn't consistent but almost always put the U in. (God knows what he actually wrote. In handwriting he used about half a dozen spellings of his surname, none of which is the one we use.) Johnson observed rather than imposed usage, and favoured the usual spelling. Noah Webster, on the other hand, deliberately and prescriptively removed the U from words like colour and flavour, just to make American spelling more distinctly American. Some of Webster's invented spelling reforms didn't catch on, but that one did and it's helped give American English its particular local, um, colour and, um, flavour.