Soon after the first edition of the Swedish Academy’s Word List (SAOL) was published in 1874, it was officially established as the standard for Swedish orthography. As the spelling rules it generated were largely based on the etymology of the words, the imposed orthography in some cases was at odds with the accepted usage. One such example is the Swedish equivalent of pillow-case, which according to SAOL should have had the spelling örngått, even though the word at that time was usually written örngott. The article examines the extent to which this attempt at standardization affected actual language use. It is clear that the attempt achieved some success: during the last two decades of the 19th century, örngått became the dominant form in the dictionaries and in the newspapers it became almost as frequent as örngott. But when SAOL finally accepted the spelling örngott as an alternative to örngått in its seventh edition in 1900, the latter spelling largely disappeared from the language within just a few decades.