Why does British English consist of many misspelled words?
I’m not sure if you intended for this to be ironic or not, but I’ll try to answer this as thought you hadn’t. Great Britain (England) can claim the origin of the English language. America was once a British colony and, being composed mostly of British colonists, the main language spoken was English. Spelling was not standardised in English until well after the American Colonies were established. Dictionaries published in both countries took the more commonly used spellings. Time apart has led to further changes in the spelling and pronunciation, but the languages, if you can actually consider them separate, share the same origin. American spellings are more concerned with the phonetic pronunciation of a word, whereas British English words are spelt with the language of origin in mind. Centre, for instance, comes from the Old French word ‘centre’ and further back from Latin ‘centrum’ and the Greek ‘kentron.’ With theatre we see a similar etymology. O.Fr. ‘theatre,’ Latin ‘theatrum,’ and
