One commentator observed that it was "brilliantly peculiar" that " labour is spelt labour in Australia, but the party is the Labor Party ". Australia hews to Britain in matters of spelling, preferring theendings enshrined in Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary to the compressedof his American rival, Noah Webster, whose first dictionary was published half a century later. [ See the effect here on the spelling of "labour" in America.] Before this, writers in English used the two interchangeably.