Learn English – Why don’t Americans write “devor” instead of “devour”

american-englishorthographypronunciation-vs-spelling

Why don't Americans write devor instead of devour to be consistent with the pervasiveness of using variations such as color and armor?

Best Answer

No it wouldn't, because devour doesn't rhyme with colour/color or armour/armor. It does rhyme with hour.

In other words, the ending -our is only respelled as -or when it represents an unstressed, r-colored schwa [ɚ]. The stressed diphthongs in hour, devour, flour, etc. retain their original spelling.

Related Solutions

Learn English – “ou” versus “o” in spelling words like “color”/”colour”

You're correct that "o" is US and "ou" is non-US. It'd be considered bad style to switch between them in the same text. Generally, you should just choose one style and use it consistently, and you will be understood. I've heard a rule that if you're writing for a mostly American audience, you should use the American spelling, and otherwise use the international forms, but that may not even be necessary.

One place that mixing styles is allowed is when quoting verbatim from text, or in technical literature where spellings must be retained exactly:

I asked him what colour he wanted, and he said "I'm no good at picking colors".

The color: #ffffff; property indicates a text colour of white.

Learn English – Do Americans say “don’t” as often as the British

I did some searches in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and compared the results to similar searches in the British National corpus.

What I found was that overall, in American English there was a 7.9-to-1 ratio of don’t to do not. With breakdowns by type:

SPOKEN    19.6
FICTION   17.9
MAGAZINE   7.5
NEWSPAPER  7.7
ACADEMIC   0.5
TOTAL      7.9

In British English overall, the ratio was 4.4-to-1 in favor of don’t, with breakdowns by type:

SPOKEN     56.9
FICTION    16.8
MAGAZINE    4.1
NEWSPAPER   3.4
NON-ACAD    0.9
ACADEMIC    0.2
MISC        0.9

So, if it is reasonable to conclude anything from this data, it is that Americans overall use don’t about twice as frequently as the British, but the British use don’t in speech about 2.9 times more frequently than Americans. In any case, these are not big enough ratios to be noticeable by anyone not counting every incidence.