Before the spread of the printing press, written texts in many European vernaculars varied widely in spelling from one region, and even one scribe, to the next. A single word might appear in half a dozen forms within the same manuscript. Print did not immediately impose order, but over several decades it exerted a quiet pressure toward uniformity: printers, seeking the widest possible market, gradually favored spellings that readers across regions could recognize. Standardized orthography was thus less a deliberate reform than a byproduct of commerce. Historians of language note that the forms that prevailed were not always the most logical or phonetically accurate; they were simply the ones that early, influential print shops happened to adopt and repeat.