Why do Americans spell “colour” incorrectly?
Buggy spellchecking programs.
We’re rebels! (No, really.)
I’m so sorry. I just realized this was GQ. Ok, I think it does have something to do with us rebelling from you guys, and changing a lot of things at that point so we wouldn’t seem inferior or just a spawn of you. But I can’t say for sure, so I’ll slink away now. Apologies.
Because it’s too much labor to put the “u” in there.
Because there has yet to be an American born who can resist getting Canadians mildly annoyed.
Oh yeah, and because of this guy.
Anyway, there’s almost 300 million of us, so we win. 
Actually, we spell it correctly. According to Dictionary.com:
You guys screwed it up from the original Latin, and we fixed it.
Americans misspell color for several reasons.
- Favor.
- Flavor.
- Harbor.
- Odor.
- Your a looser, you morron.
Think of all the ink saved over the years by not printing those extra "u"s.
Actually, we Americans don’t spell it incorrectly. We spell it correctly for American English. One could just as easily ask why the English spell jail as gaol. Neither spelling is incorrect–they’re just in different versions of English.
I believe Anaamika is closer to the truth on this one. I don’t currently have a cite but for some reason that is what I am remembering from my college days.
To the OP, I realize you may be trying to be cute but you do realize neither way is wrong. It’s strictly cultural. What is acceptable and “correct” in England may not be so here and vice versa. One thing that appears to be happening, however, with so much instant global communication is that Americans and British are swapping/melding a lot of vocabulary and speaking styles. Personally, I think it’s cool.
I think it’s more a question of honor.
I’ve used the ‘u’ since I was a kid, because I found it more aesthetically pleasing.
There’s another side to this question: why do British, Canadians and Australians spell it “colour”? Just as Noah Webster is the main influence on US spelling, a big influence on British spelling was Samuel Johnson, and he preferred “colour”.
We needed all those u’s to spell United States after freeing ourselves from your British tyranny!
If your next question was going to be “Why don’t Americans spell Alumin(i)um with an ‘ium’ like all of the other elements in the periodic table?”, just be warned that the last person who asked this got smacked around the head with a large chunk of Molybdenum, causing him to fall to his death in a vat of molten Platinum.
Or, if you want the proper answer, it was us (the English) who changed the name Aluminum to Aluminium; the yanks just left it as it was.
Wouldn’t the proper way to spell the bolded pronoun be we?
It was we who changed the name…
It was us who changed the name…
If you say so - I’m not a grammar expert ‘we who’ doesn’t roll off the tongue though, does it (I understand that this doesn’t make it wrong).
Actually, shouldn’t the ‘who’ be ‘that’?
Do you say “It is me” or “It is I”?