Category Archives: Spelling

If you haven’t yet read Part 1, please do so.

The English long vowel sounds went through some major changes. This happened gradually, over a period of about 400 years starting in the 14^th century. The word time was once pronounced just like team is today, while what is now team used to be pronounced similarly to today’s tame. This process is known as the Great Vowel Shift. While the sounds shifted, the spellings of words generally didn’t, and that’s why the pronunciation of English vowels can confuse learners, even in words that are spelt in a consistent way. It also explains why, when I try and spell words to non-native speakers, they are often confused by the letters A, E and I. To complicate matters further, some words escaped the vowel shift, or only shifted partially, and that’s why road and broad don’t rhyme, and neither do bear and hear.

English spelling wasn’t standardised until the 18^th century, which is relatively recent. If I’d given my students those spelling tests (see Part 1) 300 years ago, they all would have got 100%; the idea of “right” and “wrong” spelling didn’t exist then. William Shakespeare famously wrote his name in about a dozen different ways, which included just about anything you could think of except, apparently, Shakespeare itself! When spellings were eventually set in stone, they weren’t done so in any logical way. Now we might decide to put cheese in the freezer, but we could just as easily be putting cheeze in the freeser. That cheese got an S while freeze got a Z was essentially random.

There have been attempts to modify and simplify English spelling (there were several in the early 20^th century) but with one notable exception, none of them have worked. English spelling has remained an untamed mess. There are reasons for this. What sort of changes would you bring in? A small one (removing silent k, say) or a transition to an entirely phonetic language, wër yoo end up wiθ sumθing laik ðis? How would people agree, on both sides of the Atlantic and everywhere else in the world where English is spoken? If New Spelling became a reality, how would you search documents or web pages that might be written in Old or New Spelling? What would happen to QWERTY keyboards? How would you deal with words that have multiple pronunciations, like vase, which I pronounce /vɑːz/ but others pronounce /veɪs/ or /veɪz/? Here you can hear all three common pronunciations of vase. All of these factors make any systematic spelling changes almost impossible to achieve. Other languages have undergone spelling reform, as Romanian did on a fairly minor scale in the early 1990s, but none of them faced the challenges that English would. The one reform that did succeed, by the way, was lexicographer Noah Webster’s changes in American English: colour became color, centre became center, and so on. But in other parts of the English-speaking world, the old spellings stayed the same.

That’s it for Part 2, but be sure to check out Part 3, where I talk about some of the specific features of English spelling that make it so confusing.

Warning: This post is directed at upper-intermediate and advanced learners of English.

In the past few months, I’ve given my intermediate-level students (and above) a multiple-choice spelling test. My best students have also attempted a second – harder – test, showcasing some common words that are often misspelled, even by native speakers. My students’ scores have varied quite a bit, with the average being somewhere in the 60–70% range for the first test, and 40–50% for the second. As I keep telling people, these are not terrible scores. Native speakers often struggle their whole lives with spelling, and I’m going to spend this series of three posts explaining why. (The best performer on both tests so far is a young Italian man. As you’ll see in Part 3, that might not be a coincidence.)

So just why is English spelling such a nightmare?

English is a real mish-mash. In the last 1500 years, it has acted like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up words from anywhere and everywhere. It started out as a Germanic language, which already had its fair share of Latinate words. When the Vikings arrived they added their own twist, then the Norman Conquest brought many thousands of French words into the mix. Later, English became swamped by Latin and Greek words as educated people began to travel more (and learn Latin and Greek!). Most recently, English has adopted words directly from languages as diverse as French (faux pas), Japanese (kimono) and Sanskrit (karma).

Why is this a problem? Well, for a start, it increases the number of words in the English language that you have to learn and could potentially spell wrongly, but more importantly, every time you borrow from a new source, you borrow whatever spelling rules that language happens to have. And they might be completely different from anything your own language had previously. Take the word pizza, for example. I recently read that this word has only existed in English since 1935. It’s incredible, really, to think that when my grandparents were growing up, English had no word for what is now an extremely popular food item. When the word did enter the lexicon, they were suddenly confronted with a double Z that stood for a “ts” sound. That might sound fine, but English already had a number of double-Z words, like fizz, puzzle and blizzard, where the double Z represented a simple “z” sound. So this one new word added an extra complication to English spelling all by itself. (The English language could have got round this problem by spelling pizza phonetically, but unlike other languages it has a strong tendency not to do this, and anyway, what spelling would it have adopted? Peetsa? Peetsuh?)

As English borrowed more and more words from its various source languages, it took its sounds from those languages at the same time. Standard British English, which I speak and teach, has 44 sounds (24 consonants, 12 vowels, and 8 diphthongs, which are basically two vowel sounds pronounced as one). That’s a lot. But English never let go of the Latin alphabet, which only has 26 letters! To enable an undersized 26-letter alphabet to spell every word in a language with 44 sounds, you have to allow either (a) some letters to stand for more than one possible sound, throwing all hope of a phonetic alphabet out the window, or (b) employ digraphs or trigraphs: two or three letters that are used together to make a single sound. Unfortunately, English has done both, and in a very unsystematic way. Of course, English could have done what many other languages have done, and use diacritics like é or ç, or other weird letters from outside the standard Latin set, but by the time anybody might have thought to do this, English spelling was already such a mess that adding a few lines and squiggles wouldn’t have achieved all that much.

When English was swamped by all these new Latin and Greek words, some crazy people successfully changed the spellings of existing English words to make them look more Latin or Greek, even when the changes were unjustified. The word island used to be spelt without an S, but the S was added to make it look more like the Latin word insula, even though the word doesn’t have Latin roots. The same thing happened with debt and doubt, which were once (sensibly) spelt without a B. The influx of Greek words brought the ph combination (for the “f” sound) into play, and these same mad people started putting ph into words that weren’t Greek-derived at all (like nephew) just because they thought it looked more impressive. While having nothing to do with Latin or Greek, another example of a spelling becoming more complicated for unjustified reasons is the word hiccup, which is that feeling and noise you get in your throat that you can’t stop, and is often caused by fizzy drink or spicy food. Some people thought it would be a clever idea to include “cough” in the spelling of this word, so hiccough was born, even though the pronunciation remained the same. Thankfully sanity seems to have prevailed with this word, and most people now spell hiccup in the original way.

That’s more than enough for Part 1, but please check out Part 2 for more background into the weird and wacky world of English spelling.