How printing fixed English spelling, from Caxton to Johnson

Printing fixed English spelling, but far more slowly than the usual story says. William Caxton set up England's first press at Westminster in 1476, and the books he printed there spell the same word in different ways, sometimes a few lines apart. Most of today's spellings settled in print between about 1500 and 1700, and some waited for the dictionaries.

EdCitation publishes this guide. It rests on the British Library's pages on Caxton (read in an archived copy), Westminster Abbey's own page, the 1890 Early English Text Society edition of Caxton's Eneydos, the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and studies by linguists and historians of the book, all read on 2 October 2026. Where we read a scholar only as another reports them, we say so; a story we could not trace is marked unconfirmed.

EdCitation's free Find sources and Cite a source were run for this guide, with the results in the last section. The wider history is in a short history of English, and odd spellings word by word in why English spelling is so strange.

How did printing affect English spelling?

Printing affected English spelling in three overlapping stages, and only the last made it nearly uniform. Caxton's press put London English into type from 1476 without settling how words were spelt; through the sixteenth century printers developed habits of their own; and from 1582 spelling books, then dictionaries, pressed the remaining variants towards one form.

The dates, each with its source

Printers or schoolmasters?

Scholars still argue over who did the fixing. Howard-Hill (2006), in his abstract, credits the printing house: reprints of a Caxton work modernised before the reformers could have had any effect, and the printing-house economy, notably apprentices distributing type, set up common, usually shorter spellings that compositors carried from shop to shop. Rutkowska (2013), comparing thirteen editions of one almanac printed between 1506 and 1656, finds both at work: early printers regularised on their own, later ones partly followed the spelling books.

That slow settling is one reason English spelling is not phonetic: letters were being fixed while pronunciation kept moving. The vowels' part is told in the Great Vowel Shift.

When did Caxton set up his printing press in Westminster?

In 1476. The first record of Caxton back in England is his annual rent for a Westminster shop on 30 September 1476, though the British Library cautions that he may have settled there earlier (British Library, n.d.-d). Westminster Abbey (n.d.) places the shop near the Abbey, at the sign of the Red Pale.

He arrived an experienced printer. Caxton, a mercer who had worked for years in Bruges, took up printing in Cologne in the early 1470s and, around 1473, probably in Bruges, produced the first book printed in English (British Library, n.d.-c). His first substantial book in England was very probably the Canterbury Tales, dated to 1476 on the evidence of its type and paper (British Library, n.d.-a). About 68 per cent of his surviving editions are in English, where he faced little competition (British Library, n.d.-b).

What does Caxton's eggs passage show about spelling?

Caxton's eggs passage, in the prologue to his Eneydos of 1490, is about which word to print, not how to spell it. We read it in the Early English Text Society's 1890 edition, which keeps Caxton's spellings (Caxton, 1490/1890). A mercer named Sheffield asks a woman at the Foreland for eggs; she says she speaks no French, and understands only when another traveller asks for eyren. Caxton then asks "what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren" (p. 3).

What the printed page shows

On the page, the passage also shows what printing had not yet done: the merchant asks for eggys, and three lines later would have had egges (p. 2). The British Library (n.d.-b) says Caxton's spelling varies widely within each book and more from book to book, partly because each compositor followed his own habits and partly because of the copy he set from. Caxton lacked the background to create a new norm, it adds; at most, his books strengthened a growing sense that London English was the national standard.

Our view, from that page: the passage shows a publisher choosing words for buyers across England. Spelling was a separate problem, and Caxton never set out to solve it.

Did Flemish printers put the h in ghost?

Possibly, but the documented claim is narrower. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary says that, so far as its evidence showed, the gh of ghost appears first in Caxton, "probably influenced by the Flemish gheest"; it stayed rare until the mid-sixteenth century and was not fully established until about 1590 ("Ghost," 1901).

What the scholars say about Caxton's compositors

Shute (2017), a Sheffield doctoral study of Caxton's spelling, sets out the debate. Scragg, Samuels and Blake drew attention to Caxton's compositors because most fifteenth-century compositors were not native English speakers, and Hotchkiss and Robinson held them responsible for a spelling "so far removed from the English then being spoken". Blake followed Dutch-influenced forms, the gh of ghost among them, through successive printings of Reynard the Fox, Caxton's translation from Dutch, and found them in many later texts.

Who the compositors were is less certain. Shute (2017) reports no clear evidence of where Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton's assistant and successor, came from, though circumstantial evidence, after Blake, suggests Caxton may have brought him, a Flemish compositor, from Cologne. By the first Canterbury Tales the shop had two compositors and two presses at work, and Shute thinks Caxton probably hired more compositors locally.

What is unconfirmed

The popular version goes further: Flemish-speaking typesetters wrote gh before a hard g, as Flemish did, and Holy Ghost was printed so often that this spelling stuck (A Way with Words, 2021). Dutch-influenced forms in Caxton's books are documented. A team of Flemish typesetters at Westminster, and the Holy Ghost explanation, we found in no scholarly source: treat both as unconfirmed.

Did printers add letters to fill their lines?

Not in Caxton's shop, according to the one test we found. The idea is old: in 1569 John Hart complained of spellings padded to fill "the Compositors line in printing" with "superfluous letters", as Shute (2017) quotes him.

Shute (2017) tested it on Caxton's two editions of the Canterbury Tales, comparing prose, justified to both margins, with verse, which never reached the right-hand margin, in tales set by one compositor. If spellings were changed to fit lines, the prose should show more changes. It showed fewer: 112.23 per 1,000 words against 148.55 in the verse, with words lengthened and shortened almost equally (245 and 249). The spellings, Shute concludes, came from people, the compositor and the copy, not from the space on the line.

Earlier scholars held that printers preferred shorter spellings, and Howard-Hill (2006) credits printing houses with spreading shorter forms later; Shute's result covers one fifteenth-century shop.

What was the Chancery Standard, and do scholars still accept it?

The Chancery Standard is the name Michael Samuels gave in 1963 to the spelling of the royal Chancery's English documents from about 1430, which he called the basis of modern written English. Several scholars now doubt both halves of that claim.

Samuels sorted late medieval English writing into four types. Type IV, the Chancery Standard, was the latest, "that flood of government documents" after 1430, as Shute (2017) and Wright (2017) both quote him; its spellings included forms still in use, such as not, such and any. John Fisher extended the idea in work from 1977 onwards.

The case against

Michael Benskin rejected Fisher's claims in 2004, pointing out, as Shute (2017) reports, that the standard written language of the Chancery and Signet offices was Latin. Wright (2017) shows London accounts kept in Latin or Anglo-Norman French with English words embedded until the late fifteenth century; the switch to monolingual English came around the 1480s, and choosing single correct spellings took about two centuries more. Standard English, in her account, grew from wider trade and contact, not from an "imposition of Chancery house-style". We could not read Fisher's or Benskin's own texts.

And Caxton

Most studies, Shute (2017) reports, find some Chancery spellings in Caxton's books but not the full set, and Samuels found forms from Caxton's Kentish upbringing kept throughout. On the evidence we read, a straight line from Chancery clerks through Caxton to modern spelling is too neat.

What was fixed by 1600, and what waited for the dictionaries?

By 1600 printed English looked familiar, but whole classes of spelling were still moving.

Settled, or nearly, by 1600

• Ghost, established with gh by about 1590 ("Ghost," 1901).
• The suffix -ly: de Worde's 1528 Kalender of Shepherdes uses it alone, more consistently than the book's seventeenth-century printers (Rutkowska, 2013).
• Spelling books: Rutkowska (2013) cites Vivian Salmon on Mulcaster's 1582 Elementarie as the first theoretical attempt to codify English spelling, and notes that Edmund Coote's handbook of 1596 was reprinted and re-edited 64 times after his death.

Still moving after 1600

• u and v, i and j: their standardisation at the start of words came in an abrupt, synchronised change between the 1620s and the 1640s, in Condorelli's (2021) sample of Early English Books Online.
• -nesse and -ness: -nesse led from the 1556 Kalender; in the 1656 edition -ness was only 11 per cent of the suffix's spellings, and -full still outnumbered -ful (Rutkowska, 2013).
• Handwriting: print neared today's spelling in the later seventeenth century; handwriting much later (Rutkowska, 2013).

Johnson, publishing his dictionary in 1755, still found English spelling "unsettled and fortuitous", and made few changes, perhaps most of them, he wrote, from modern back to older practice (Johnson, n.d.). Its making is told in Samuel Johnson's dictionary.

How do you find and cite research on early modern English spelling?

Search the linguists' papers, read each at the publisher, and take every reference from its record. EdCitation is the best tool for that step, because it looks every reference up in the publisher's record and never writes one. EdCitation never writes any part of anyone's work, a line we hold with pride: the argument and every sentence stay yours.

1. Search in Find sources, free with no account: about 300 million published works, by topic or by the claim a sentence needs, filtered by kind of source, years and open access.
2. Check titles and dates at the publisher (see the runs below).
3. Build each reference in Cite a source, free, from a DOI, title, PubMed ID, ISBN or web address, in APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 18 author-date, Harvard, IEEE or Vancouver, each source screened for retraction.
4. Cite old texts in the edition you read: the 1890 Eneydos, not Caxton's 1490 print (history books for students).
5. Check the list in Verify references, free: each entry verified, "check this" or not found, retractions flagged, and a check that could not run never shown as not found.

Two Find sources runs, quoted as they came back

On 2 October 2026, "early modern English spelling printing", sorted by Best match, returned a total of 14,906 from OpenAlex. First came T. H. Howard-Hill's "Early Modern Printers and the Standardization of English Spelling" (2006), then Alistair Baron's "Dealing with spelling variation in Early Modern English texts" (2011, a Lancaster thesis) and "Guidelines for normalising Early Modern English corpora: Decisions and justifications" (2015) by Dawn Archer and three co-authors.

Sorted by Most cited, the total was the same. First came Roger Mitton's "English spelling and the computer" (1995, 66 citations), then Martin Kjellgren's "Taming the prophets : astrology, orthodoxy and the Word of God in early modern Sweden" (2011, 55), which is about Sweden, then the Archer guidelines (53) and Howard-Hill (46).

Read each record against the publisher. The fifth Best match result came back as "Positional spelling redistribution: word-initial / and / in Early Modern English (1500–1700)", the letters <u>/<v> and <i>/<j> lost, with its online year, 2020 (print, 2021). Condorelli's thesis of that name came back dated 1970. Orthographies in Early Modern Europe came back with its editors as the book names them, Susan Baddeley and Anja Voeste, the catalogue's life dates left off.

One Cite a source run

From Howard-Hill's DOI, 10.1353/mlr.2006.0060, Cite a source returned, from Crossref, in APA 7:

Howard-Hill, T. H. (2006). Early modern printers and the standardization of English spelling. Modern Language Review, 101(1), 16–29. https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2006.0060

The title is in sentence case with English kept, as APA asks, and no retraction was reported. That entry stands, and it is the one under References.

Quick questions

When did William Caxton bring printing to England?

In 1476: the first record of his Westminster shop is a rent payment of 30 September 1476.

Why does ghost have an h?

The first Oxford English Dictionary found the gh first in Caxton's printing, probably influenced by Flemish gheest; it was fully established about 1590.

What is the Chancery Standard?

Michael Samuels's 1963 name for the spelling of royal Chancery documents after about 1430, which he saw as the basis of written English. Later scholars, among them Benskin and Wright, reject that account.

Did early printers add letters to fill their lines?

Shute's study of Caxton's Canterbury Tales found no sign of it: spellings changed less often in justified prose than in verse.

Which EdCitation tool finds research on early modern English spelling?

EdCitation's free Find sources, which returned 14,906 results for "early modern English spelling printing", Howard-Hill's 2006 article first.

References

• British Library. (n.d.-a). The Canterbury Tales. Caxton's Chaucer. Archived January 26, 2021, at https://web.archive.org/web/20210126182155/https://www.bl.uk/treasures/caxton/canterbury.html
• British Library. (n.d.-b). Caxton's English. Caxton's Chaucer. Archived November 14, 2020, at https://web.archive.org/web/20201114001854/https://www.bl.uk/treasures/caxton/english.html
• British Library. (n.d.-c). Caxton's life. Caxton's Chaucer. Archived December 2, 2020, at https://web.archive.org/web/20201202183431/https://www.bl.uk/treasures/caxton/caxtonslife.html
• British Library. (n.d.-d). From Flanders to Westminster. Caxton's Chaucer. Archived December 6, 2021, at https://web.archive.org/web/20211206022303/https://www.bl.uk/treasures/caxton/flanderswest.html
• Caxton, W. (1890). Caxton's Eneydos, 1490: Englisht from the French Liure des Eneydes, 1483 (W. T. Culley & F. J. Furnivall, Eds.). Early English Text Society; Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner. (Original work published 1490) https://archive.org/details/caxtonseneydos00virguoft
• Condorelli, M. (2021). Positional spelling redistribution: Word-initial <u>/<v> and <i>/<j> in Early Modern English (1500–1700). English Language and Linguistics, 25(4), 799–823. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1360674320000349
• Ghost. (1901). In J. A. H. Murray & H. Bradley (Eds.), A new English dictionary on historical principles (Vol. 4, F and G). Clarendon Press. https://archive.org/details/oed04arch
• Howard-Hill, T. H. (2006). Early modern printers and the standardization of English spelling. Modern Language Review, 101(1), 16–29. https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2006.0060
• Johnson, S. (n.d.). Preface to A dictionary of the English language (J. Lynch, Ed.). (Original work published 1755) https://jacklynch.net/Texts/preface.html
• Rutkowska, H. (2013). Towards regularisation: Morphological spelling in several editions of the Kalender of Shepherdes. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 48(1), 7–28. https://doi.org/10.2478/stap-2013-0001
• Shute, R. (2017). A quantitative study of spelling variation in William Caxton's printed texts [Doctoral thesis, University of Sheffield]. White Rose eTheses Online. https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/19945/
• A Way with Words. (2021, October 23). Why does "ghost" have an "h"? https://waywordradio.org/why-does-ghost-have-an-h/
• Westminster Abbey. (n.d.). William Caxton. https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/commemorations/william-caxton
• Wright, L. (2017). A multilingual approach to the history of Standard English. In P. Pahta, J. Skaffari, & L. Wright (Eds.), Multilingual practices in language history: English and beyond (pp. 339–358). De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501504945-016