Visitors who lean in close to the Liberty Bell often spot what looks like a glaring flaw cast into one of the country’s founding symbols. The state name is rendered “Pensylvania,” with a single “n.” The instinct is to call it a typo set permanently in metal. The reality is more interesting and more revealing about the era that produced it: the spelling was entirely acceptable when the bell was made, and the same version turns up in the U.S. Constitution.
What the Bell Actually Says
The full inscription wraps the bell in three parts. Around the top runs a passage from Leviticus: “Proclaim LIBERTY Throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants Thereof Lev. XXV. v X.” Below it comes the line that draws the double takes: “By Order of the ASSEMBLY of the Province of PENSYLVANIA for the State House in PhiladA.” Centered on the bell’s waist are the names of its founders and a date, “Pass and Stow / Philada / MDCCLIII,” the Roman numerals marking 1753.
“Philada” is an abbreviation for Philadelphia, a routine shorthand of the period rather than a slip. The one-“n” rendering of the state name belongs to the same world, where written English had not yet hardened into the fixed forms taught today.
Why the Spelling Was Not an Error
Eighteenth-century English had no standard orthography. Dictionaries had not yet locked words into single accepted forms, and educated writers spelled the same word several ways, sometimes within one document. “Pennsylvania” was written with one “n” or two, and in other variations, without anyone treating a given choice as wrong.
The National Park Service, which oversees the bell, addresses the point directly, noting that it is “often incorrectly noted that there is a misspelling” on the Liberty Bell. The agency explains that spelling was not standardized in the period and that the one-“n” version was acceptable. Judged by the conventions of 1753 rather than those of the present, the inscription contains no mistake at all.
The Same Spelling Appears in the Constitution
The strongest evidence that “Pensylvania” was legitimate sits in the nation’s founding charter. When the Constitution was drafted in 1787, the one-“n” spelling appears in the document where the states are listed at the close. The form that looks like a careless error on a bell was, decades later, deemed appropriate for the text that established the federal government.
The pattern extends beyond those two artifacts. Original maps displayed at Independence Hall in Philadelphia also render the state as “Pensylvania,” and the same maps label the Atlantic as “The Western Ocean,” another reminder that the vocabulary of the era differed from today’s in ways that had nothing to do with carelessness. The bell is a snapshot of written English before standardization, not a monument to a casting blunder.
How the Bell Came to Carry the Words
The inscription was a deliberate commission, not an afterthought. The Pennsylvania Assembly ordered the bell to mark the fiftieth anniversary of William Penn’s 1701 Charter of Privileges, the colony’s founding framework of government. Isaac Norris, the Quaker speaker of the Assembly, selected the Leviticus passage about proclaiming liberty.
The colony’s London agent, Robert Charles, placed the order with the firm of Lester and Pack, the London foundry later known as the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, for roughly £150. The bell arrived in Philadelphia in 1752 and cracked on its first test ring, either from a flawed casting or brittle metal. Two local craftsmen, John Pass and John Stow, took on the recasting, breaking up the original and melting it down, then adjusting the metal mixture when their first attempt produced a poor tone. Their second version was hung in the State House steeple, now Independence Hall, in June 1753, which is why their names and that year are cast into the bell.
A Window, Not a Blunder
The enduring “error” story persists because modern eyes apply modern rules to an eighteenth-century object. The bell predates the dictionaries and style guides that later fixed American spelling, and reading it as a mistake imposes a standard that did not yet exist when Pass and Stow poured the metal.
Today the bell sits in the Liberty Bell Center in Philadelphia, where more than a million people pass it each year, and many leave convinced they have caught the founders in a spelling slip. What they have actually seen is a faithful record of how the state’s name was written in 1753, preserved in bronze long enough for the spelling to fall out of use around it. The single “n” is not the bell’s flaw. It is one of the most honest things about it.
