The English language was first introduced to the Americas by British colonization, beginning in the early 17th century. Similarly, the language spread to numerous other parts of the world
as a result of British colonization elsewhere and the spread of the former British Empire, which, by 1921, held sway over a population of about 470–570 million people: approximately a
quarter of the world's population in that time.
Over the past 400 years, the form of the language used in the Americas – especially in the United States – and that used in the United Kingdom and the rest of the British Isles have
diverged in many ways, leading to the dialects now commonly referred to as American English and British English. Differences between the two include pronunciation, grammar,
vocabulary (lexis), spelling, punctuation, idioms, formatting of dates and numbers, and so on. A small number of words have completely different meanings between the two dialects or are
even unknown or not used in one of the dialects. One particular contribution towards formalizing these diff erences came from Noah Webster, who wrote the first American dictionary
(published 1828) with the intention of showing that people in the United States spoke a different dialect f rom Britain.
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