Color or Ñolors
Color or colors is the same thing which has been packed in a different cover. Color and color mean the same thing and the only difference between both is the spelling. Color and color are both used as a form of writing. It could be interesting to study the history of both of these different spellings.
The Origin of Color
The word “color” originated from Anglo-Norman French. Color has plenty of different uses and definitions. According to the dictionary by Samuel Johnson which had been published in the year 1755, there are quite a lot of words which are used currently in British spellings. From the time that this dictionary had been published to 1828 when the American Dictionary of English had been published by Noah Webster, the spelling had been simplified under American English.
The spellings which had been changed under the American English language owe it huge to Noah Webster. His strong philosophies and nationalism had influenced many changes in the spellings of a lot of words. Some of these changes are viewed today as correct in comparison to the original words.
The Change of Colors to Color
In color, “our” is unstressed and it had been simplified to just color. The case is the same with quite a lot of other words like flavour, favour and savour and other worlds like manoeuvre, centre, litre and metre which were all changed to maneuver, center, liter and meter. Words like defence and pretence were changed to defense and pretense.
A list of all the revised spellings had been prepared in 1878 by American philologists. Two years later the Philological Society of England too followed suit. it was in the year 1883 that both these societies issued a joint study which recommended few simplifications.
The American society had also released a list of the recommended revisions which had been as amny as 3500 words. All the changes had been welcomed later by Webster.
Color Search
Although the meanings of both of these words are the same, the way the word is researched today on the internet is affected by the spelling change. Search engines like AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google all consider both the words as different. If you search for color you would be shown sites which uses American spellings.
Gray or grey too had been affected by the different British and American spellings. Grey is the British official spelling while gray is the spelling used in American English. However, color and colors would always mean the same to people.