English spelling reform

Thierry Fontenelle writes about French spelling reform, and how our work on the Office speller paid off with an award-winning implementation that's being recognized as much better than anything out there from Openoffice. But what about U.S. and English spelling? Did you know that there have been serious attempts to reform spelling in the U.S. too? If you study the history of spelling reform in the English you might be surprised to hear that in 1906 Congress overturned an executive order by Teddy Roosevelt that tried to mandate simplified spellings of a whole bunch of words. In fact, some people speculate that the White Sox are not the White Socks partly because such reforms were popular in the early 20th Century.