Why was it decided in 1956 to abolish the spelling чорт (devil) in favor of чёрт?

Question

I read in Wiktionary:

чорт

This spelling of the word was officially abolished in 1956 in favor of чёрт and is no longer in use. Both variants are pronounced identically.

(Source)

I see in Ngram Google Books that it was indeed common before 1956 to write чорт in books.

Wikipedia says that in Belorussian and Ukrainian, this word is still spelt as чорт.

The new spelling, чёрт, has a disadvantage: if the dots over е are omitted as usual, the word becomes indistinguishable in writing from the plural genitive of the Russian word черта (line, trait, feature).

What was the motivation to officially abolish the spelling чорт in favor of чёрт in 1956? Could it be that someone superstitious wanted to save Russians from explicitly referring to devils and thought that replacing o by ё/e would do the trick to keep black powers at bay?

Answer 1

Before the standardization both forms, черт/чёрт and чорт were in actual use, like we see from this google ngram chart:

(Strictly speaking, we should sort out черт derived from черта but this won't change the very fact that both form co-existed.)

In Russian grammar there's a concept called проверочные слова - in short it's about existence of words that are pronounced and/or spelled in such way that we justify the spelling of some other word. When it comes to чёрт, the one form has been chosen over another and the actual reason was that there's a lot of words with черт (но ё) - чертовской, чертяка, чертыхаться, чертёнок and choosing чёрт was a very natural and intuitive thing to do.

With чопорный we do not have any similar situation, basically it's only чопорный so it was left the way it is (well, in Russian it used to be words like чепори́ться, чепу́ри́ться but they are obsolete). As of чокнутый by the way people quite often misspell is a чёкнутый and that usage in its turn lead to the existence of word чекану́тый.

Still, just like always I want to insist that it's more an issue of memoization than anything else. For instance, there is чёрствый, not чорствый and one just should learn it.

Answer 2

What was the motivation to officially abolish the spelling чорт in favor of чёрт in 1956?

Definitely it was NOT officially abolished from the language. The official direction of language politics in USSR was to remove any occurence of Ё letter.

I think чёрт started to appear since 1900s years effectively pushing off old word чорт. General sentiment was to disapprove the policy of Russian Csar Nikolai II, during his late terms or ruling. Right after he lost Russian-Japaneese war of 1905. Especially during his "business engagements" with Rasputin.