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see, the source of -or/-our words are mostly from latin, right when they were originally borrowed from latin, the ending was spelled -or. when the normans invaded england, they brought the -our ending that old french had for them with them. that ending was applied to old borrowings as well. so really you can blame the original problem on the french. after the british stopped aping the french they reborrowed more terms from latin, but there was confusion as to whether those words should be spelled with -or or -our: the general consensus was for -or, but still not a decided thing. webster's just used -or for everything on the basis of that being the original spelling. johnson's used -our in the french-gotten cases.