Poll: Colour or Color?

[Odbarc]

I type color the american way. I am also canadian though.

Same with armor and such.

 

[soren7550]

Color, because you don't pronounce any U's and because I'm American.

 

[DarkRyter]

Coler.

Because I'm a loose cannon who doesn't play by the rules.

 

[UberNoodle]

If I'm not mistaken the British added the 'u' to make it seem more elegant and graceful. But this was ages ago.

Honestly I think it's kinda silly people even argue over trivial things like this. Zee, Zed, whatever. Doesn't matter.

There have many periods and movements in the English language's history and in terms of the 'extra U', it's meant to reflect the French origin of those words. I wouldn't be surprised if the American drive to remove the 'U' wasn't at least in part an attempt to 'de-Frenchify' the English language. Don't take that too seriously. I am just musing.

 

[Deviltongue]

Quite a few Former British colonies on this site...

I hope you are including the USA is that list.

I mean, that still use British spelling for shit...

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

It's a u people, stop removing letters because you're lazy, America.

 

[UberNoodle]

Color, unless you want to be an elitist who uses archaic spelling and drinks tea out of tiny cups with their pinky finger sticking out.

I mean, come on! The 'u' in 'colour' is silent anyway. If 'colour' was pronounced 'col-ur' instead of 'col-or' then you might have a point. Either that or this debate would be whether or not the spelling should be 'colour' or 'colur'.

Hell, even Firefox's spell-checker disagrees with you; every instance of 'colour' I have in the reply editor is marked as a spelling error. I guess that's because I got the American English version instead of the British or Australian English version, but still.

Ahh, the 'archaic' argument. I am sure you are just joking around but just to comment on that: probably nothing is pure in English and to avoid any corruptions or archaisms would be a neverending endevour. So we remove a few U's from some words. Well what about all of the endless other examples of inconsistancy? Those U's and so on, reflect the history of their words. Since only learners of the language would need to spell phonetically (natives spell most words automatically from memory), a U here or not here, doesn't really matter. It could have an X in it, and natives would still know 'how to spell it'.

 

[Infinatex]

I was under the impression that it was 'colour' everywhere in the world except for the U.S.A.

 

[kaveradeo]

I think it helps pronunciation. In America its spelled color and pronounced cuhler. Isn't it longer like cuhloor or cuhlore in places where it's spelled colour? Same for armor "armer" and armour "armore."

 

[Svizzara]

I'm Canadian, so I spell it as ?colour?.

 

[kaveradeo]

I'm Canadian, so I spell it as ?colour?.

How do you pronounce it?

 

[Drexlor]

I use "color," because I speak American.

 

[child of lileth]

Color, because I'm American. I like the other way better though, but I don't want to be a poser and use it for no reason.

 

[UberNoodle]

I'm Canadian, so I spell it as ?colour?.

How do you pronounce it?

Color, because you don't pronounce any U's and because I'm American.

How about 'knife', 'gnat', 'phone', 'Queen', 'comfortable', etc?
Should it be 'nife', 'natt', 'fone', 'kween', and 'comftable'?
Spellings are just symbols collected together which represent what we generally agree for them to mean, so we COULD spell the words like that, if enough of us understood those spellings. Those letters only have sounds because we attribute those sounds to them. Look at languages like Japanese, where one Kanji character has at least two pronunciations, if not several. English is kind of messed up, no matter how you look at it, when it comes to consistancy in its rules, both in grammar and spelling. Many of those inconsistancies come from uneven changes in the language. There have been so many attempts to reform it. American English is the result of one such attempt. Many aspects of British English are also the result of reforms. But there is just so much that could be changed!

 

[Trebort]

Colour. It's the only way of spelling it.

End of thread

 

[technoted]

Being English I spell it colour, I get rather annoyed with the constant dumbing down of English spellings just to make it easier.

 

[TheTaco007]

I'm American and I still spell it colour. I don't care what spell-check says. I also spell gray with an e; grey.

 

[Red Hood]

It depends on the context. In the U.S.A, we spell it "color"; everywhere else they spell it "colour". It's like "grey" and "gray".

 

[kaveradeo]

Is there a difference in pronunciation? Can someone who uses colour type how they pronounce it?