English spelling

English spellings A-Z and their exceptions

2010-11-08T22:15:00.000-08:00

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http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com/2010/05/another-blog.html

Listed below are all English spelling patterns in alphabetical order, accompanied by the words which disobey them. When words with irregular spellings almost equal or outnumber those with regular ones, all common words with that spelling pattern are also listed.
        Words marked with x2 have two pronunciations,
        e.g. tearx2 [teer/tair].

A - (bad, cat, rang) - except:
       plaid, plait, meringue, have (cf. gave).

-able /-ible – (notable, audible) - (27 –able, 17 –ible):
Abominable, adorable, amiable, arable, available, capable, comparable, constable, desirable, doable, formidable, inevitable, inflammable, irritable, liable, miserable, notable, portable, probable, reliable, remarkable, respectable, suitable, syllable, valuable, variable, vulnerable.
     Audible, compatible, edible, eligible, feasible, flexible, horrible, illegible, incredible, invisible, permissible, possible, responsible, sensible, terrible, visible, tangible.

a-e / ai - (late, lain)
     The main spelling for this sound inside words is a-e (made),
but before l and n it is more often ai (rail, rain),
or both (male/mail):
       Ail/ale, bale/bail, male/mail, pale/pail,
       sale/sail, tale/tail, whale/wail,
       dale, female, gale, inhale, scale, stale,
assail, cocktail, detail, fail, hail, jail, nail, prevail, rail, retail, snail, trail.
        Main/mane, pain/pane, plain/plane,
        rain/reins(reindeer)/reign, vain/vein,
abstain, again, ascertain, attain, brain, chain, chilblain, complain, contain, detain, drain, explain, gain, grain, obtain, refrain, remain, retain, slain, sprain, stain, strain, sustain, train;
acquaint, ain’t, faint, paint, quaint, saint;
        Crane, lane, sane, membrane.
Skein; deign, feign; campaign; champagne.
       There are also 55 other unpredictable spellings
                                  for the a-e/ai sound:
Made/maid, aid,  braid, laid, paid, raid, afraid.
Brake/break, stake/steak.
Aim, claim, exclaim, maim, proclaim.
Place/plaice. Haste, paste, taste, waste/waist;
Daisy, praise, raise, raisin. Traitor, waiter.
Ate/eight, bate/bait, grate/great, straight/straits, wait/weight. Fête, freight.
Faith. Halfpenny, neighbour. Able, cable, cradle, fable, gable, ladle, sabre, stable, table – (cf. label).

Air / are / ear – (hair, care, swear...)
        Fairly unpredictable:
        Air/heir, fair/fare, flair/flare, hair/hare,
        pair/pare/pear, stair/stare,
chair, hair, lair, stairs, dairy, prairie, affair, despair, éclair, repair, questionnaire.
       Bare/bear, blare, care, dare, glare, mare, rare, scare, share, snare, spare, square, area,
aware, compare, declare, parent, prepare;
canary, hilarious, malaria, Mary, various, vegetarian, wary.
       Swear,   tear x2[tair / teer],
      Aerial, aeroplane, aerobatics.
      There/their, ware/where/wear.

-al - (actual, admiral, animal ...) - in at least 200 words,
         but -el / -il / -ol in 31 others:
Caramel, cockerel, colonel, cruel, diesel, drivel, duel, easel, fuel, gravel, hazel, hostel, jewel, label, novel, spaniel, towel, vowel, weasel.
Civil, devil, evil, pupil.
Capitol, carol, cholesterol, idol, parasol, petrol, pistol, symbol.

-ar - (far) - has just three exceptions: are, heart, hearth.
     For speakers of standard British English,
      the following have an ar/ah sound too:
Ask, bask, blast, cask, cast, caste, clasp, contrast*, fast, flabbergast, flask, gasp, ghastly, grasp, last, mask, mast, past, rascal, task, vast, brass, class, glass, grass, pass, mass*.
   Advance, avalanche, banana, branch, chance, dance, chant, enhance, glance, lance, plant, prance, slant, soprano, stance, trance.
   After, craft, daft, draft, giraffe, graft, raft, shaft, staff.
Almond, calf, calm, half, halve, palm, gala.
   Drama, example, panorama, salami.
Bath, path, father, lather, rather.
   Bra, la, ma, pa, spa, ah, hurrah, shah, baa,
armada, fuselage, promenade, strata, vase.
   Graph, draught, laugh.    Aunt.     Clerk.

-ard - (coward, forward) - only one exception: shepherd.

-ary / -ery / -ory / -ry - unpredictable:
       (37 –ary / 58 others):
Adversary, anniversary, arbitrary, aviary, boundary, burglary, commentary, contemporary, contrary, diary, dictionary, elementary, estuary, February, January, library, literary, military, monetary, necessary, ordinary, planetary, preliminary, primary, pulmonary, reactionary, revolutionary, salary, secondary, secretary, solitary, stationary, summary, temporary, veterinary, vocabulary, voluntary.
   Archery, artery, artillery, blustery, celery, cemetery, colliery, crockery, delivery, discovery, drudgery, every, gallery, jewellery, lottery, machinery, monastery, mystery, nursery, pottery, recovery, robbery, scenery, stationery, surgery.
   Category, dormitory, factory, history, inventory, ivory, laboratory, memory, observatory, satisfactory, territory, theory.
   Carpentry, chemistry, country, entry, gantry, industry, infantry, paltry, pantry, pastry, poetry, poultry, symmetry, tapestry.
   Century, injury, luxury, Mercury, mercury, treasury.
   Savoury.

Au / aw /...(autumn, awful, all, alter) - unpredictable:
     Auburn, auction, audible, August, authentic, author, authorise, automatic, autonomy, autumn, daub, gaudy, sauce, saucer, haul, maul, Paul, assault, cauldron, fault, tarpaulin, somersault, vault,
haunt, jaunt, launch, launder, staunch, taunt,
applause, cause, pause, Santa-Claus, exhaust,
astronaut, cosmonaut, nautical, taut, caution.
    Awe,
    awful, awkward, awning, bawdy, dawdle, hawk, squawk.
Bawl, brawl, crawl, drawl, scrawl, shawl, sprawl, trawl.
   All, almost, already, also, altogether, always,
ball, call, recall, fall, gall, hall, pall, small, squall, stall,
install, tall, wall,   instalment,
appal, bald, scald, chalk stalk, talk,
altar, alter, (alternate, alternative), falter, halt, salt;
     poultry.
Brawn, dawn, drawn, fawn, lawn, pawn, prawn, sawn, spawn, yawn.
     Caught, daughter, haughty, naughty, slaughter, taught.
     Bought, brought, fought, nought, ought, sought, thought.
Broad.
     Walnut, walrus, waltz; water.
War/wore, warble, ward (award, reward), wardrobe, warm, warn/worn, warp, wart, dwarf.

–ay /-ey /-eigh - (say, they, weigh) - (30 –ay, 19 others):
       Bay, bray, clay,
day (Monday – Sunday, midday, today, yesterday),
fray, gay, hay, lay, may, okay, pay, play, pray, ray, say, slay, spray, stay, stray, sway, tray;
array, astray, away, betray, decay, delay, dismay, display.
They, grey, hey, convey, obey, survey.
   Neigh, sleigh, way/whey/weigh.
Ballet, beret, bouquet, buffet, duvet, chalet, crochet.
   Café, matinée.

B - (bib, bob) – no exceptions, but sometimes silent
      (bomb, crumb, dumb, lamb, limb, numb, thumb, succumb,
      debt, doubt, subtle)
or put to other use
      (climb [clime], tomb [toom], womb [woom]).

- bb- / -b- - (bobbin – robin) - unpredictable.
                    See Doubled Consonants.

Ca-, co-, cu- - (cat, cot, cut) - with 19 exceptions:
Chameleon, chaos, character, chasm, mechanical;
kaleidoscope, kangaroo, karate, kayak, skate;
Anchor, cholesterol, chorus, psychological, school;
Bouquet[bookay], quoit, turquoise; queue [cue].

-cc- / -c- / -ck - (occupy – document - rocket) - unpredictable.
                         See Doubled Consonants.

cl-, cr-... - (clip, crib, picnic, doctor) –
     for k-sound before consonants – except:
Chlorine, chocolate.
Christmas, chrome, chrysalis, chrysanthemum; mackerel.
Technical, cockney, cocktail.

-c- - (cancel) - Inside words c is the main spelling
                      for an s-sound before e and i,
                       but with exceptions.
Absent, advertisement, arsenic, consent, consequence, conservative, insect, insert, morsel, persevere, prosecute.
Analysis, basic, basin, consider, consist, crisis, emphasis, insist, oasis, persistent, responsible, tonsil, university, utensil. Capsize, prehensile.
Abscess, ascend, ascertain, descend, descent, condescension, crescent, disciple, discipline, fascinating, proboscis.
   Ancestors, cancel, cancer, concentrate, concept, conception, concern, concert, December, decent, grocer, innocent, license, licentious, magnificent, necessity, parcel, percent, perception, pincer, porcelain, princess, process, procession, reception, recent, recess, rhinoceros, saucer.
   Conceal. Conceit, conceive, deceit, deceive, receipt, receive.
Facetious, precede, procedure. Proceed, proceedings, proceeds. Plasticine.
Council/counsel, criticism, deciduous, decision, facilities, hyacinth, incident, medicine, narcissus, Pacific, participation, pencil, precision, principal, principle, specific, stencil.
Coincide, decide, decisive, decipher, docile, exercise, precise, recite, suicide; society,

-c - (lilac) - for k-sound at the end of longer words,
       except:
Anorak, kayak; attack, barrack, ransack; stomach.

-ce / -se - (face /case) - for final s-sound after long vowels,
                 38 –ce , 21 –se:
Ace, brace, embrace, face, grace, lace, pace, place/plaice, race, space, trace. Peace/piece, fleece, niece, police.
Dice, ice, mice, nice, price, rice, slice, twice, vice, advice, device, sacrifice. Choice, rejoice, voice.
Introduce, juice, reduce, truce, sluice. Sauce.
      Base, case, chase.
Cease, crease, grease, increase, release, geese, these.
Concise, precise. Dose. Goose, loose, noose, mouse.
Close x2, house x2, excuse x2, use x2.
[too cloce to cloze; too good a houce to houze...,
   no uce, to uze]

-ce - (practice, promise, fortress) - In unstressed endings,
     the spelling of the final s-sound and the vowel before it
      are both unpredictable:
A practice/to practise(in UK), apprentice, armistice, coppice, crevice, justice, notice, novice, office, precipice, service.
     Menace, necklace, palace, surface, terrace. Lettuce.
Premise, promise.
Analysis, axis, basis, bronchitis, chrysalis, crisis, emphasis, hypothesis, iris, oasis, pelvis, proboscis, synthesis, tennis, tonsillitis, trellis.
   Purchase.
        Atlas, canvas, Christmas, pampas, pyjamas.
    Carcass, compass, embarrass, trespass.
Abscess, access, congress, cypress, fortress, mattress, process, progress, recess, harness, witness.
Purpose, tortoise.

-ce - (fence, force, else)
          - final s-sound after consonants.
After -n- mainly -ce (mince), except:
Dense, expanse, expense, immense, intense, license,
nonsense, response, rinse, sense, suspense, tense.
   After l or p, always -se:
Else, pulse, impulse.
Collapse, copse, corpse, eclipse, elapse, glimpse, lapse.
   After r - 13 –se, 8-ce:
Coarse, course, curse, gorse, hoarse, horse, nurse, purse, rehearse, reverse, universe, verse, worse.
Commerce, divorce, enforce, fierce, force, pierce, reinforce, source.

Ch - (chip) – regular,
       with –tch (catch) after short vowels:
Catch, hatch, latch, match, patch, scratch, snatch, thatch, dispatch; sketch, stretch, wretch; ditch, hitch, itch, pitch, stitch, switch, twitch, witch; notch, watch; hutch, Dutch.
       Except: rich, which, much, such, touch, attach, detach.

-cian - (musician) – regular ending
            for adjectives formed
             from nouns ending with –ic (music - musician)

-ck - (back, pocket) - for a k-sound after short vowels,
         except:
Mac, sac, rec (short for ‘recreation ground’). Yak.
Crocodile, decade, documents, executive, recognise, record, second, secular, vacuum.
Accurate, occupy, piccolo, soccer, succulent, tobacco.
Cheque, chequered, lacquer, liquor.
Echo, mechanism. - (See also Doubled consonants).

-cy - (fancy) - main spelling for a see-sound in word endings:
   Accuracy, delicacy, aristocracy, conspiracy, democracy, diplomacy, policy, juicy.
Agency, emergency, fancy, frequency, vacancy, tendency, urgency. Mercy.
   Except:
Controversy, courtesy, fantasy, gypsy, topsy-turvy. Embassy.

D - (dad) – completely regular

-dd- / -d- - (shoddy – body) - unpredictable.
                       See Doubled Consonants.

De- / di- - (devise, divide) - as unstressed prefix,
                     56 de-, 28 di-:
Decay, deceive, December, decide, (decision, decisive), deciduous, decipher, declare, decline, deduct, defeat, defect, defend, defiant, define, definite, degree, delay, delicious, delight, deliver, demand, democratic, demolish, deny, depart, department, depend, deport, deposit, depress, derive, descend, describe, deserve, design, despair, despatch, despise, despite, destination, destiny, destroy, detach, detain, detect, detention, detergent, determine, detest, devalue, develop, devise, devote, devour.
   Dictate, diffusion, dilapidated, dilemma, diploma, diplomatic, disappear, disaster, discharge, disciple, discover, discuss, disease, disguise, disgust, dismantle, dismay, displace, display, dispose, dispute, distinct, distribute, disturb, divide, (division), divine, divorce.

-dge - (bridge) for the j-sound in short words,
            after a short vowel, to differentiate from long vowels,
            (e.g. badge – cage) - regular:
Badge, bridge, cadge, dodge, dredge, edge, fridge, grudge, hedge, judge, ledge, lodge, nudge, ridge, sledge, smudge, trudge.
            In longer words dg / g is less predictable
                              (e.g. fidget digit)
Badger, budgie, budget, fledgeling, fidget, midget, dodgems, dodgy, podgy, drudgery.
   Digit, legend, legislate, logic, pigeon, regiment, register, religion, rigid, vegetable;
Exaggerate; suggest (can be [sugjest] in US).

Doubled Consonants
      Schoolchildren learn to double the final consonant of one-syllable words before the suffixes -ing, -ed, -en, -er, -y or -ish
(e.g. bat - batting, batted, batty, batter) to show that the preceding stressed vowel is short, rather than long, as in
     ‘bate - bated, bating’.
     With one-syllable words this rule is used consistently, but some longer verbs have doubled consonants before -ed and -ing, even when the preceding vowel is not stressed:
benefitted, travelled (cf. preferred, permitted).
     In longer root words, English consonant doubling
     after short, stressed vowels is very inconsistent:
373 words (e.g. mellow) obey the doubling rule
384 words (e.g. melon) disobey it and
158 words (e.g. satellite) have needlessly doubled
                  consonants after unstressed vowels.
The lists below show, consonant by consonant, and vowel by vowel, the words with regularly doubled consonants after short vowels, with undoubled consonants (or other letters, e.g. 'dizzy prison') and with needlessly doubled letters.

Abbey, cabbage, jabber, rabbit, Sabbath, shabby; ribbon; hobby, lobby; chubby, rubber, rubbish, stubborn, stubby.
     Cabinet, cabaret, cabin, elaborate, fabulous, habit; nebula, treble; liberal, liberty, tribute; probable, robin.
     Abbreviate.

Bracken (ck is the main spelling for a k-sound after a short vowel), bracket, jacket, packet, package, racket; beckon, reckon, bicker, chicken, cricket, flicker, rickety, sticky, ticket, wicked, wicker, wicket, cockerel, crockery, hockey, jockey, locket, pocket, rocket, rocky, socket, stocking, bucket, sucker, cuckoo.
       Vacuum, decade, executive, recognise, record (noun), second, secular; crocodile, documents.
Accurate, tobacco; piccolo; occupy, succulent.
Echo, mechanism;
chequered, liquor, liquorice; lacquer.
      Accommodate, accommodation, accompany, accomplish, accord, accordion, account, accumulate, accuse, accustom, occasion, occupation, occurrence, succumb.

Adder, caddie, caddy, daddy, ladder, eddy, teddy, wedding, giddy, hidden, ridden, shoddy, sodden, rudder, shudder, sudden, pudding.
      Academy, adequate, radical, radish, credit, dedicated, edible, edit, educate, federal, medical, pedal, pedigree, meadow, ready, already, steady, hideous, video, body, modern, modest, produce (noun), study.
      Add, odd.

Daffodil, scaffold, traffic, effigy, effort, different, difficult, jiffy, coffee, coffin, offer, office, buffalo, buffer, buffet, chuffed, ruffian, suffer, suffocate.
     Café, refuge, refuse (noun), heifer, magnificent, significant, profit.
    Affair, affect, affection, afford, paraffin, effect, efficient, differential, diffusion, offend, official, sufficient, chauffeur.

Baggage, jagged, maggot, scraggy, stagger, swagger, beggar, snigger, trigger, soggy, luggage, nugget, rugged.
     Agony, dragon, flagon, hexagonal, negative, brigand, frigate.
   Aggressive. Egg.

Alley, alligator, ally, ballast, ballet, ballot, challenge, gallant, gallery, gallon, gallop, gallows, mallet, rally, shallow, stallion, valley, bellow, belly, cellar, cello, cellophane, fellow, intelligent, jelly, pellet, rebellion, sellotape, trellis, umbrella, yellow, armadillo, artillery, billiard, billion, billow, billy, brilliant, frilly, gorilla, guerrillas, guillotine, illustrate, milligrams, million, pillar, pillow, silly, syllable, vanilla, villa, village, villain, collar, colleague, collie, colliery, dollar, follow, hollow, holly, jolly, lollipop, lolly, mollusc, pollen, pollinate, trolley, volley, college, swallow, wallaby, wallet, wallop, wallow, lullaby, sullen, bullet, bulletin, bullion, bullock, bully, pulley, pullover.
     Analysis, balance, battalion, calendar, chalet, galaxy, italic, morality, palace, palate, palette, reality, salad, salary, salon, talent, talon, valentine, valiant, valid, value, vitality, celery, delegate, delicacy, deluge, develop, element, eligible, helicopter, jealous, melody, melon, pelican, relevant, relic, skeleton, telescope, zealous, ability, bilious, military, ventriloquist, cylinder, abolish, colony, column, demolish, holiday, olive, policy, politics, polythene, solemn, solid, tolerate, volume, voluntary, knowledge, quality, colour.
        With long, instead of short vowels: controlled, roller, swollen.
   Parallel, excellent, hello, jewellery, marvellous, satellite, constellation, caterpillar, illegible, illiterate, illusion, illustration, illuminate, pastille, tonsillitis, collage, collapse, collect, collide.

Ammonite, clammy, hammer, inflammable, mammal, mammoth, stammer, dilemma, glimmer, simmer, symmetry, comment, commentary, commerce, common, communism, communist, dummy, mummy, rummage, summary, summer, summit, summon, tummy.
     Amateur, camel, camera, damage, dynamic, enamel, famished, laminate, cemetery, chemical, democrat, emerald, epidemic, memory, remedy, lemon, feminine, premise, semi, criminal, eliminate, image, limit, timid, women, abominable, comet, comic, dominate, domino, economic, prominent, promise, vomit, stomach, plumber.
    Ammunition, programme, immediate, immense, immortal, immune, command, commemorate, commence, commercial, commit, commodities, commotion, communication, communion, community, commuter, committee, recommend.

Annual, banner, cannot, granny, manner, nanny, pannier, savannah, spanner, uncanny, antenna, pennant, tennis, penny, dinner, inner, innocence, innocent, spinnaker, bonnet, sonnet, bunny.
     Animal, anorak, banish, banister, canopy, granary, manage, manor, manual, organic, panel, panic, spaniel, vanish, benefit, enemy, energy, menace, penetrate, venison, lieutenant, any, many, aluminium, clinical, continue, finish, linear, minimal, minister, opinion, sinister, spinach, vinegar, cinema, cynical, synagogue, synonym, minute [minnit], astonish, conifer, economy, electronic, monastery, monarch, monument, supersonic, tonic, honey, money, onion, punish.
     Anniversary, announce, annoy, connect, personnel, mayonnaise, questionnaire.

Appetite, happen, happy, nappy, pepper, flipper, kipper, skipper, slipper, copper, coppice, opposite, poppy, sloppy, puppet, puppy, supper, upper.
     Capital, capitol, rapid, tapestry, capita, epic, jeopardy, leper, leopard, tepid, separate, weapon, copy, opera, operate, proper, property, topic, popular, tropics.
     Appal, apparatus, apparent, appeal, appear, appendix, applaud, apply, appoint, appreciate, apprentice, approach, appropriate, approve, approximate, hippopotamus, opportunity, oppose, suppose, supply, support.

Arrow, barren, barrier, barrister, barrow, carrot, carry, garret, marrow, marry, narrative, narrow, parrot, sparrow, merry, sherry, terrace, terrible, territory, terror, irritable, mirror, squirrel, stirrup, borrow, corridor, horrible, lorry, porridge, sorrow, sorry, tomorrow, torrent, quarry, warrant, warren, burrow, current, furrowed, hurricane, hurry, scurry, turret, worry, furry.
     Arab, arable, arid, asparagus, baron, caramel, caravan, caricature, carol, chariot, charity, clarity, comparison, parasol, parish, transparent, America, beret, ceremony, cherish, derelict, herald, heritage, heroine, heron, merit, peril, perish, sincerity, sterilise, therapist, very, bury, conspiracy, empirical, lyric, miracle, spirit, syrup, tyranny, authority, coral, florist, forest, historic, horoscope, majority, minority, moral, orange, priority, laurel, quarantine, thorough, courage, nourish.
     Arrange, array, arrest, arrive, barricade, erratic, interrupt, serrated, terrific, irregular, irrigation, torrential, correspond, correct, correlation, curriculum, surrender, surround, hurrah.

Asset, ambassador, casserole, classic, massacre, massive, passage, passenger, delicatessen, essay, essence, lesson, message, necessity, professor, missile, narcissus, rissole, blossom, colossal, fossil, gossip, possible.
     Acid, capacity, pacifist, glacier (US glaishier), decimal, precipice, necessary, recipe, specify, specimen, , electricity, explicit, municipal, participate, publicity, simplicity, solicitor, velocity. Chrysalis, sausage. Fascinate, adolescent, convalescent, crescent, discipline.
    Assail, assassin, embassy, assault, assemble, assert, assessment, assign, assist, associate, assort, assume, cassette, dessert, essential, possess, possibility.

Attic, attitude, batter, battery, chatter, clatter, fatty, matter, patter, pattern, regatta, scatter, shatter, tatter, latter, better, confetti, jettison, jetty, letter, lettuce, spaghetti, bitten, bitter, glitter, kitten, litter, mitten, pretty, sitter, titter, twitter, written, bottom, cottage, cotton, forgotten, lottery, motto, otter, potter, butter, button, clutter, gutter, mutter, mutton, putty, shutter, splutter, stutter, utter.
     Atom, baton, catalogue, catapult, category, compatible, lateral, latitude, platinum, platypus, satin, strategy, athletic, magnetic, metal, petal, tetanus, veteran, yeti, competitive, British, citizen, city, critical, pity, literally, obliterate, botany.
     Attach, attain, attempt, attend, attention, attorney, attract, attributed, battalion, tattoo, mattress, omelette, palette, settee.

Blizzard, dizzy, buzzard.
     Hazard, lizard, wizard, wizened, lozenge.
     Desert, designate, desolate, hesitate, peasant, pheasant, pleasant, present, president, resident, miserable, prison, risen, visible, visit, closet, deposit, positive.
     Scissors.

Doubled consonants in word endings
       (pebble, muddle, ruffle..., cliff, well, fuss)
Several dozen words with a short vowel end with a doubled consonant, followed by -le (apple) or –ckle (tickle), but many others do not use this pattern; mm, nn and rr are always followed by -el instead (channel) and -ssle is spelt mainly -stle (bristle) The basic patterns also have several exceptions.
     Bubble. - Double, treble, trouble.
     Toddle. – Model.
     Tickle. - Nickel.
     Apple. - Chapel, triple, couple.
     Scuttle. - Subtle.
     Fizzle. – Chisel.
        Trammel. - Camel.
        Channel. - Panel.
       Barrel. - Laurel.
     Hassle. - tassel,
     vessel - trestle, wrestle, bristle, gristle, thistle, whistle,
                    apostle, jostle,
     bustle, hustle, rustle. - Muscle/mussel.

-ff, -ll, -ss - (cliff, well, fuss) – are used at the end of
                   many short words, except:
Chef, clef, if, of.   Cough, rough, slough, tough, trough;
graph, laugh;   bus, gas, plus, us, yes.

E - (bed, bend) - has 64 exceptions, 49 of which are ea:
       Bread/bred, breadth, breast, breath, dead, deaf, dealt, death, dread, dreamt, head, health, lead x2[leed/led], leant, leapt, meant, readx2[reed/red], realm, spread, sweat, thread, threat, wealth.   Breakfast, cleanliness, cleanse, endeavour, feather, heather, heaven, heavy, instead, leather, measure, stealthy, treacherous, treadmill, treasure, weather.
   Friend. Leisure, lieutenant [lesure, leftennant in UK].
Against, said, says, every, Wednesday.
   The following are also without a doubled consonant after their short e-sound (as in 'jelly, teddy, penny'):
Jealous, meadow, peasant, pheasant, pleasant, ready, (already), steady, weapon, zealous.
   Any, many. Jeopardy, leopard. Berry/bury. Heifer.

Ee / ea / e-e ... – (deed, lead, concede, siege, conceive, police,
                                       people, key, ski )
Spelling of the ee-sound is predictable only when it is
a stressed ending (agree, chimpanzee).
In other words the spellings for it are highly unpredictable,
and 48 words have two spellings.
   Bee/be, beech/beach, been/bean, beet/beat, breech/breach, cheep/cheap, creek/creak, deer/dear, discreet/discrete, eerie/eyrie, eve/eaves, feet/feat, flee/flea, freeze/frieze, jeans/genes, Greece/grease, heel/heal, hear/here,   key/quay, leech/leach, leek/leak, meet/meat, need/knead, pee/pea, peace/piece, peek/peak, peel/peal, peer/pier, reed/readx2[reed/red], reek/wreak, reel/real, sealing/ceiling, seamen/semen, see/sea, seem/seam, seen/scene,   serial/cereal, sheer/shear, sheikh/chic,   steel/steal,   sweet/suite,   tee/tea, teem/team, wee/we, week/weak, wheel/weal.
In UK English also: geezer/geyser, leaver/lever.
       The other 360 words with an ee-sound are spelt as follows.
       Beef, beer, beetle, between, bleed, bleep, breed, breeze, career, cheek, cheer, cheese, cheetah, creep, deed, deep, eel, exceed, feeble, feed, feel, fleece, fleet, geese, greed, green, greet, indeed, jeep, jeer, keel, keen, keep, kneel, meek, needle, peep, pioneer, preen, proceed, proceedings, proceeds, queen, queer, reef, screech, screen, seed, seek, seep, seesaw, sheep, sheet, sleek, sleep, sleet, sleeve, smithereens, sneer, sneeze, speech, speed, squeeze, steep, steeple, steer, street, succeed, sweep, sweet, teeth, teetotal, thirteen, tweed, tweezers, weed, weep, wheedle, wheeze, wildebeest.
   Appeal, beacon, bead, beak, beam, beard, beast, beaver, beneath, bleach, bleak, bleat, breathe, cease, cheat, clean, clear, colleague, conceal, congeal, cream, crease, creature, deal, dean, decrease, defeat, disease, dream, dreary, each, eager, eagle, ear, ease, east, Easter, eat, fear, feast, feature, freak, gear, gleam, glean, heap, heat, heath, heathen, heave, increase, leadx2, leaf, league, lean, leap, lease, leash, least, leave, meagre, meal, mean, measles, near, neat, ordeal, peach, peat, plead, please, pleat, preach, queasy, reach, really, reap, rear, reason, release, repeat, retreat, reveal, scream, seal, sear, season, seat, sheaf, sheath, smear, sneak, speak, spear, squeak, squeal, squeamish, steam, streak, stream, teach, teak, tearx2, tease, theatre, treacle, treason, treat, treaty, veal, wean, weary, weasel, weave, wheat, wreath, year, yeast, zeal.
   Open e (eve, evil, zero): Adhesive, arena, cafeteria, cedar, chameleon, Chinese, comedian, compete, complete, concrete, convene, convenient, decent, demon, equal, era, even, evil, experience, exterior, extreme, female, fever, frequent, genie, genius, hero, hyena, imperial, inferior, ingredient, intermediate, legal, legion, lenient, material, medium, mere, meteor, meter, millipede, mysterious, obedient, period, peter, polythene, precede, previous, query, recent, recess, region, relay, scheme, sequence, sequin, series, serious, serum, species, sphere, stampede, strategic, superior, supreme, swede, tedious, theme, theory, these, torpedo, trapeze, vehicle, Venus, zero.
He, me, she.
   Open i: Albino, antique, aubergine, bikini, clementine, fatigue, guillotine, machine, magazine, margarine, marine, mosquito, plasticine, police, prestige, ravine, regime, routine, sardine, suite, tambourine, tangerine, trampoline, unique, vaseline, pizza.
    Achieve, belief, believe, brief , chief, diesel, field, fiend, fierce, grief, grieve, hygienic, medieval, niece, pierce, priest, relief, relieve, shield, shriek, siege, thief, thieve, tier, wield, yield.
    Caffeine, codeine, protein, seize, weir, weird,
conceive /coneit, deceive /deceit, receive /receipt.
       Assorted other variants: People; cathedral, secret; pizza, ski, souvenir; debris.

-en / -on / -an /-ain /-in - (fasten, certain, apron...)
   The unstressed vowel in endings, before –n is spelt mainly e,
   but with many exceptions:
Abdomen, alien, awaken, barren, batten/baton, bitten, bracken, brazen, brighten, chicken, children, chosen, christen, citizen, delicatessen, dozen, driven, eleven, even, fallen, forgotten, frighten, frozen, garden, given, glisten, golden, happen, heathen, heaven, hidden, hydrogen, kindergarten, kitchen, kitten, laden, lessen/lesson, lichen, listen, loosen, madden, mitten, often, omen, open, oven, oxygen, pollen, raven, ridden, ripen, risen, rotten, sadden, seven, sharpen*, sodden, specimen, spoken, stamen, stolen, strengthen, sudden, sullen, swollen, taken, threaten, token, vixen, warren, women, wooden, woollen, written.
   Abandon, apron, bacon, badminton, baron, beacon, beckon, bison, carbon, carton, cauldron, common, comparison, cordon, cotton, coupon, crayon, crimson, damson, demon, dragon, electron, flagon, gallon, heron, horizon, iron, jettison, lemon, mason, matron, melon, mutton, nylon, octagon, pardon, pentagon, person, phenomenon, piston, poison, prison, pylon, python, reason, reckon, ribbon, salmon, salon, Saxon, season, sermon, siphon, skeleton, summon, talon, treason, venison, wagon, wanton, weapon.
Chameleon, dungeon, luncheon, pigeon, surgeon, truncheon.
   Alsatian, amphibian, cardigan, Christian, civilian, comedian, Dalmatian, historian, hooligan, Indonesian, magician, metropolitan, musician, ocean, optician, organ, orphan, partisan, pedestrian, pelican, republican, Roman, rowan, ruffian, slogan, suburban, tartan, toucan, turban, urban, utopian, vegetarian, veteran, woman.
Hurricane.
Bargain, captain, certain, fountain, mountain, porcelain, villain.
Aspirin, basin, bulletin, cabin, catkin, coffin, cousin, dolphin, gherkin, goblin, javelin, origin, paraffin, penguin, pumpkin, raisin, robin, satin, sequin, tarpaulin, urchin, vermin.

-ence/-ance – (commence / ambulance) – The spelling of this
                            unstressed endings is unpredictable:
   Absence, adolescence, circumference, commence, competence, conference, confidence, consequence, difference, essence, evidence, existence, experience, independence, indifference, influence, innocence, insolence, intelligence, interference, licence, occurrence, offence, presence, providence, reference, science, sentence, sequence, silence, violence, conscience, patience.
   Abundance, acceptance, accordance, alliance, allowance, ambulance, appearance, appliance, assurance, balance, distance, endurance, finance, fragrance, guidance, ignorance, importance, instance, insurance, maintenance, nuisance, performance, resistance, significance, substance, vengeance.

-ent / -ant - (competent/ protestant)
        The main spelling for this unstressed ending is -ent,
        in at least 107 words,
        with 35 exceptions:
Assistant, brilliant, covenant, defiant, distant, elephant, fragrant, gallant, giant, ignorant, important, infant, instant, jubilant, lieutenant, merchant, pageant, peasant, pheasant, pleasant, protestant, relevant, remnant, restaurant, sergeant, sextant, truant, tyrant, valiant, warrant.
Applicant, descant, significant, vacant. Extravagant.

er /ur / ir / ear ... - (berth, burst, bird, earn, worth)
     The stressed er-sound is spelt very unpredictably.
Berth, fern, her, herb, herd, jerk, nerve, perch, serve, stern, swerve, term, verb, verge, verse, were.
Advertisement, alert, alternative, anniversary, assert, certain, commercial, concern, confer, conserve, conversion, deserve, dessert, detergent, determine, emerge, eternal, exert, expert, external, fertile, germinate, hermit, impertinent, insert, interpret, jersey, kernel, merchant, mercury, mercy, observe, perfect, perfume, permanent, permit, person, pertinent, preserve, refer, reserve, reverse, sermon, serpent, terminate, termite, thermal, transfer, universal, university, verdict, vermin, version, versus, vertical.
   Blur, burden, burglar, burgle, burly, burn, burr, burst, church, churn, curfew, curl, curlew, curse, curt, curve, disturb, excursion, fur, furnish, furry, further, gurgle, hurdle, hurl, hurt, hurtle, incursion, lurch, lurk, murder, murmur, nasturtium, nurse, nursery, occur, purchase, purple, purpose, purr, purse, return, slur, spur, spurn, spurt, sturdy, suburb, surf, surface, surge, surgeon, surgery, surname, surplus, survey, Thursday, topsy-turvy, turban, turbine, turf, turkey, turmoil, turn, turnip, turquoise, turtle, urban, urchin, urge, urn, yurt.
   Birch, bird, birth, chirp, circle, circuit, circular, circumstances, circus, confirm, dirt, encircle, fir, firm, first, flirt, girder, girdle, girl, mirth, shirk, shirt, sir, skirmish, skirt, smirk, squirm, squirt, stir, swirl, third, thirst, thirteen, thirty, twirl, virtually, virtue, whirl, whirring.
   Earl, early, earn, earnest, earth, heard, learn, pearl, rehearse, search, yearn.
Word, work, world, worm, worse, worship, worst, worth.
Attorney. Courtesy, journal, journey.

-er /-or /-our... - (after, actor, nectar, armour;
                            butcher, culture)
The unstressed -er ending is spelt -er in at least 315 common
words, but over 200 words use other spellings:
The different endings sound very much alike in ordinary speech, but it helps to exaggerate their pronunciation when learning to spell them. This leaves many people believing that they sound different too, but very few really do.
   Center, fiber, oger, saber, theater, kilometer – are spelt
   centre, fibre, ogre, sabre, theatre, kilometre
in UK English, where there is also differentiation between
   metre (measure of 100cm) and meter (measuring device).
Actor, advisor, alligator, ambassador, ancestor, anchor, assessor, author, boaconstrictor, calculator, castor, conductor, conveyor, corridor, decorator, demonstrator, director, doctor, editor, elevator, emperor, equator, error, escalator, factor, gladiator, governor, indicator, interior, inventor, investors, junior, juror, legislators, liquor, major, manor, mayor, minor, mirror, monitor, motor, navigator, operator, orator, prior, professor, proprietor, radiator, razor, rector, refrigerator, respirator, rotor, scissors, senator, senior, sensors, solicitor, spectator, sponsor, successor, superior, supervisor, surveyor, survivor, tailor, tenor, terror, tractor, traitor, tutor, victor, visitor, warrior.
   In American English the following are also with –or, but –our in UK:
Armour, behaviour, colour, favour, flavour, glamour, harbour, honour, humour, labour, neighbour, odour, parlour, rumour, saviour, savour, splendour, tumour.
    Angular, burglar, caterpillar, cellar, circular, collar, dollar, familiar, grammar, jaguar, liar, lunar, muscular, nectar, particular, peculiar, pillar, polar, poplar, popular, regular, scholar, secular, similar, solar, spectacular, sugar, vicar, vulgar.
   Answer, chauffeur, jodhpurs, martyr.
Badger, danger, endanger, ginger, manager, manger, merger, passenger, stranger, teenager.
   Conjure, exposure, injure, leisure, measure, pleasure, treasure, procedure.
Butcher, catcher, pitcher.
   Adventure, agriculture, architecture, capture, caricature, creature, culture, departure, expenditure, feature, fracture, furniture, future, gesture, lecture, legislature, literature, manufacture, miniature, mixture, nature, picture, puncture, scripture, signature, structure, temperature, torture, venture, vulture.

In UK English an unstressed –a ending is pronounced much like an –er one too:
   Algebra, antenna, area, arena, armada, asthma, banana, cafeteria, camera, capita, china, cinema, cobra, dahlia, data, dilemma, diploma, drama, era, extra, formula, gala, gondola, gorilla, gymkhana, hydrangea, hyena, idea, larva, lava, llama, malaria, militia, nebula, opera, orchestra, panda, panorama, peninsula, piazza, piranha, pizza, pneumonia, propaganda, pupa, quota, regatta, replica, soda, sofa, stigma, tarantula, tiara, tuba, tundra, umbrella, utopia, vanilla, veranda, via, villa, yoga, zebra. Cheetah.

F – (fun; sniff),
      but not in the following:
Phantom, pharaoh, phase, pheasant, phenomenon, philosophy, physics, physiological, phone, photograph, phrase;
alphabet, amphibian, asphyxiate, apostrophe, catastrophe, cellophane, decipher, dolphin, elephant, emphasise, nephew, orphan, pamphlet, prophet, sapphire, siphon, sophisticated, sphere, symphony, trophy, typhoon;
Graph, Joseph, nymph, triumph.
   Laugh, draught.
Cough, trough, enough, rough, sloughx2 [slou/sluf], tough.
Chef, clef, if, of.

-ff- / -f- (offer – profit) - unpredictable.
            See Doubled Consonants.

G - (garden; get, gift) - Some words have extra letters after g
     to show that it should be pronounced as in
     ‘garden’, and not with the j-sound, of ‘gentle giant’:
Gherkin; spaghetti. Guess, guest, guerrillas.
Guillotine, guilt, guinea-pig, guitar, disguise, guide; dinghy, guy.
   Hard g before e, i and y without extra letters:
Gear, geese, get, geyser, anger, eager, finger, hunger, linger, tiger, hamburger, forget, target.
Giddy, giggle, gild, gills, gilt, girder, girdle, girl, give; begin, corgi, gymkhana.
   With totally surplus extra letters after g (cf. got big):
Ghastly, guarantee, guard, ghost, ghoulish, yogurt/yoghurt.
Catalogue, dialogue, epilogue, synagogue. Colleague, fatigue, league. Meringue, tongue.

-ge, -gi- - (age, engine, revenge) - are the main spellings for a
                 j-sound inside words and in endings, except in:
Adjective, inject, object, objection, project, reject, subject. Majesty, majestic.
Spinach, sandwich (in UK pronunciation).
   (For ‘gentle/jester’ see J.)
-gg- / -g- - (shaggy – dragon) – unpredictable.
                      See Doubled Consonants.

H – (hot, hoot) – with very few exceptions:
        Who, whom, whose, whooping. Whole, wholly.
H can cause reading problems by being silent
(school, ghastly, when), as shown under C, G and W.

I – (sit)) – with at least 53 exceptions,
      mainly y which has a variable sound (typical type)
      except:
Build, built, busy, English, pretty, sieve, vineyard, women.
     Abyss, crypt, crystal, cyclical, cygnet, cymbals, cyst, eucalyptus, gym, hymn, hypnotise, lynch, lynx, mystery, myth, Olympics, rhythm, syllable, symbol, symmetry, sympathy, symptom, synchronise, syndicate, syndrome, synthesis, system.
   The following words should really have a doubled consonant too (like ‘syllable’ and ‘symmetry’)
Chrysalis, cylinder, cynical, lyric, physics, synagogue, synonym, syrup, typical, tyranny.
   With y for an unstressed i-sound:
Analysis, bicycle, chrysanthemum, hysterical, pyjamas, platypus, synopsis, syringe.

i-e - (bite) - with quite a few exceptions:
         I /eye.
Bite/bight(bay), knight/night, lite/light, mite/might, rite/right/write, slight/sleight(of hand), sight/site/cite,
alight, blight, bright, delight, fight, flight, fright, frighten, lightning, mighty, tight.
Height; indict.
Behind, bind, blind, find, grind, hind, kind, mind, ninth, pint, rind, wind x2;
Bible, bridle, disciple, idle, rifle, stifle, trifle. (cf. libel, idol - biblical).
Child, mild, wild, whilst; island; climb (cf. children, mildew)
Tire/tyre, asylum, cycle, cypress, dyke, dynamic, dynamite, dynamo, hyacinth, hydrangea, hydrogen, hyena, hygrometer, hypothesis, nylon, paralyse, psychology, pylon, python, rhyme, scythe, style, thyroid, type, tyrant.
Eider-down, Fahrenheit, kaleidoscope.
Either, neither (UK pronunciation). Choir. Resign, sign.

In- / en- - (increase, enquire) - mostly in-,
                 but:
Enable, enamel, encamp, enchant, encircle, enclose, encounter, encourage, encrusted, endanger, endeavour, endure, engage, enforce, engrave, engulf, enjoy, enlarge, enlist, enquire, enrage, enrol, entangle, entertain, enthusiastic, entire, entitled, environment.
     Some people make an effort to pronounce the unstressed en- prefix as en- rather than in-, but in most people’s normal speech they sound the same:
     Inevitable, infect, inferior, inflate, inform, infuriate, inhabit, inhale, inject, inoculate, inquire, insane, insist, insolent, insult, intact, intend...

J – (jam, job, jug)
     Before a, o and u the spelling is completely regular,
but unpredictable before e, i and y:
     Jelly, jest, jet, jettison, jetty, jealous, jerk, jersey; jeans, jeep, jeer, Jew, jewel.
Jiffy, jig, jigsaw, jilt, jingle. Jive.
     Gem, general, generation, generous, genie, genius, gentle, genuine, geography, geranium, germ, gesture.
Gin, ginger, gipsy/gypsy, giraffe, gym, gyp. Giant, gyroscope.

K - is used:
      1) before e and i (kept, kitten, make),
      2) after long vowels (seek, speak) and
      3) after consonants (milk, ankle, mark, risk),
except:
1) Chemical, orchestra; ache, opaque;
     architect, bronchial, orchid;
     marquee, mosquito, quay/key.
2) antique, boutique, technique, unique.
3) Circle, conker/conquer, monarch, uncle,
     disk/disc, mollusc, mosque, picturesque, grotesque.

L - (lamp) – As a first letter, l is regular, except:
       llama.

-le - (dangle, nimble) - for a final l-sound
                       after several consonants,
        except:
Kernel, kestrel, mongrel, satchel, scoundrel.
Anvil, nostril.
Council/counsel, morsel, parcel,
pencil, stencil, tonsil, utensil.

-ll- / -l- - (ballad – salad) – unpredictable.
              See Doubled Consonants and also
              au and o-e (for maul/all and stole/scroll)
The only certain ll spelling is for -ell (tell, foretell),
at the enf of short and long words,
unlike full and fill - beautiful, fulfil.
            But: farewell and welcome.

M – (mum) - with the exceptions:
         Lamb, limb, bomb, aplomb, crumb, dumb, numb, plum/plumb, plumber, thumb, succumb.
Autumn, column, dam/damn, condemn, him/hymn, solemn.

-mm- / -m- - (common – comic) – unpredictable.
                        See Doubled Consonants.

N – (nun, boffin) – with the exceptions:
Need/knead, new/knew, nit/knit, night/knight,
no/know, nob/knob, not/knot.
Knack, knave, knee, kneel, knife, knobbly, knock, knuckle.
   Gnash, gnat, gnaw, gnome. Foreign, sovereign. Pneumonia, pneumatic.
Determine, discipline, famine, feminine, genuine, heroine,
imagine, masculine, medicine.
   Gone, shone; scone (pronounced ‘scon’ and ‘scone’).

-nn- /-n- - (annual – manual) – unpredictable.
                  See Doubled Consonants.

O – (on spot) - exceptions
                        mainly just after w and qu:
Swallow, swamp, swan, swap, waft, wand, wander, want/wont, wanton, warrant, warren, warrior, was, wash, wasp, watch, watt, wattle, what.
   Quality, quadrangle, quantity, quarantine, quarry,
squabble, squad, squander, squash, squat.
Also: Cough, trough; laurel, sausage.

o - e, -o - (note, no)
                 In more recently imported English words
                  the long o-sound is spelt regularly, with an ‘open o’:
                           o followed by a single consonant and e (vote)
                          or a single consonant and another vowel (soda)
                                                       or simply –o in endings (solo).
In everyday words of Anglo-Saxon origin the spelling of this sound is highly unpredictable:
       Approach, boast, boat, broach/brooch, cloak, coach, coal, coast, coat, coax, cockroach, croak, float, foal, foam, gloat, goal, goat, groan, load, loaf, loan, loathe, moan, oaf, oak, oath, oats, poach, road, roam, roast, shoal, soak, soap, stoat, throat, toad, toast.
    Knoll, poll/pole, roll/role, scroll, stroll, toll, troll, swollen, wholly.
Control, enrol, patrol.
     Bold, cold, fold, gold, hold, old, scold, sold, solder, soldier, told.
     Folk, yolk. Holster. Bolt, colt, dolt, jolt, revolt.
Both, sloth. Only. Gross. Host, most, post, postal, poster.
     Mould, moult, soul/sole, shoulder, smoulder.
Goes. Mauve. Noble.
Blown, bowl, grown, growth, known, mown, own, shown, sown/sewn, thrown, rowan.
Blow, bowx2, crow, flow, glow, grow, know, low, mow, rowx2, show, slow, snow, sowx2, stow, throw, tow.
     Arrow, barrow, bellow, below, billow, burrow, elbow, fellow, follow, gallows, hollow, marrow, narrow, pillow, shadow, shallow, swallow, sorrow, sparrow, tomorrow, wallow, widow, willow, window, yellow.
    Doe, floe, foe, hoe, roe, sloe, toe, woe.
     Oh/owe. So/sew. Dough, though.
Ago, also, fro, go, hello, no.
     Alone, arose, bone, bony, broke, choke, chose, chosen, close, clothes, clover, code, cone, cope, cove, dole, dome, dose, doze, drone, drove, froze, frozen, grocer, grope, hole, holy, home, hope, hose, joke, lone, mole, nose, open, over, poke, pony, pope, primrose, rode, rope, rose, scope, slope, smoke, spoke, stoke, stole, stolen, stone, strode, stroke, tadpole, throne, tone, whole, woke, wove, wrote, yodel, yoke.
     More recently imported words
     with regular o-e and -o spellings:
Alcove, associated, bulldoze, crochet, chrome, commotion, component, compose, casserole, devoted, diploma, dispose, elope, explode, expose, global, heroic, impose, Joseph, jovial, kimono, local, located, lotion, mobile, mode, moment, motel, motive, node, nomad, note, notice, oboe, ocean, October, omen, opal, oppose, opponent, oval, phone, poem, polar, pose, postpone, potion, proboscis, process, programme, promote, proposal, protest, quote, robe, remote, Roman, rover, slogan, sober, sociable, social, socialism, socialist, soda, sofa, solar, suppose, token, total, trombone, utopia, vocal, vote, yodel, yoke, zodiac, zone.
    Albino, armadillo, banjo, bingo, buffalo, cargo, cello, disco, domino, duo, dynamo, echo, Eskimo, flamingo, halo, hero, judo, kimono, motto, panto, piano, piccolo, Pluto, polo, potato, pro, pseudo, radio, ratio, solo, soprano, studio, tango, tobacco, tomato, tornado, torpedo, trio, video, volcano, zero.
   But: Bungalow. Cocoa. Oboe. Pharaoh. Depot.

Oi, -oy - (spoil, ploy) – These spellings have
                                               few exceptions.
Loyal, (loyalty), oyster, royal, (royalty), voyage.
      Boy/buoy.

OO, -oo - (food /good, too) - with many exceptions.
        Other spellings for long oo:
Brutal, brute, crucial, crude, fluent, fluid, Fluke, flute, frugal, glucose, intrude, jubilant, July, June, Jupiter, Jury, Juvenile, lubricate, ludo, ludicrous, lukewarm, luminous, lunar, lunatic, plural, prune, recluse, ruby, rude, ruin, rule, rural, secluded, truant, truce, truly, truth, Zulu.
     Bruise, cruise, sluice; fruit, recruit.
Acoustic, bivouac, boutique, coupon, group, recoup, route, soup, toucan, tourist, troupe, wound, youth.
     Lose, move, prove.
Tomb, womb.
     Gruesome. Sleuth. Manoeuvre. Shrewd, strewn.
Blew/blue, flew/flue/flu, threw/through, brew, crew, drew, grew, screw, shrew, slew, strew, cashew.
   Clue, glue, rue, true, accrue, construe. Gnu, guru.
Do, who, lasso. You. Choux. Canoe.
Poo/pooh, shoo/shoe, too/to/two.
     Long oo-sound spelt oo:
Baboon, balloon, bloom, boom, boon, boost, boot, brood, broom, cartoon, choose, cocoon, cool, doom, droop, food, fool, gloom, goose, groom, groove, harpoon, hoof, hooligan, hoop, hoot, lagoon, loom, loop, loose, loosen, loot, macaroon, maroon, mood, moon, moor, moot, mushroom, noodle, noon, noose, pontoon, poodle, pool, poop, poor, proof, roof, room, root, saloon, school, schooner, scoop, scoot, scooter, shoot, smooth, snooker, soon, soothe, spoof, spook, spool, spoon, stool, stoop, swoon, swoop, tool, tooth, troop, whoop, zoom.
         Boo, coo, goo, loo, moo, woo, zoo,
         bamboo, cockatoo, hullabaloo, igloo, kangaroo,
         shampoo, tattoo, voodoo, yahoo.

Short oo   spellings are all unpredictable
                    and borrowed from spellings for other sounds
                   (e.g. good/food, should/shoulder, full/dull).
Good, hood, stood, wood.
       Book, brook, cook, hook, look, rook, shook, took.
       Wool. Whoosh. Foot.
Could, should, would.
       Cuckoo.
       Bull, full, pull, bullet, bullion.
      Bush, cushion, push, shush.
      Put, butcher, pudding, pussy, sugar.
      Wolf, woman.   Courier.

Or, -ore – (lord, more) - The stressed or-sound has
        few irregular spellings inside words:
Course/coarse, horse/hoarse, source, resource. Court. Tournament.
Quart, quarter. Warm, warn, wart. Board, hoard.

As an ending -or is spelt unpredictably:
For/four, (fourth, fourteen, forty),    nor, or/oar.
Door, floor, moor, poor/pour, tour, your.
Boar, roar, soar. Abhor.
        Bore, chore, core, fore, gore, more, ore, pore, score, shore, snore, sore, store, tore, swore, wore/war.
Adore, ashore, before, carnivore, folklore, ignore, implore.

In standard UK English the regular –aw endings
                       have the same sound as -ore: Awe, claw, draw,
               flaw, gnaw, jaw, saw, straw, thaw, law, paw, raw.

Ou, -ow - (sound, now) – mainly ou inside words and
          -ow at the end, but with a few exceptions:
Flour/flower, our/hour, power, shower, tower.
Brown, clown, crown, down, drown, frown, gown, town.
Crowd, powder. Coward.
Fowl, growl, howl, owl, prowl, scowl, towel.
Browse, drowse.
       Bough, plough, sloughx2[sluf/slou]; thou.

P – (pop) – regular spelling, but
                 the letter is sometimes silent
(pneumatic, psalm, pseudo-, psycho-, ptarmigan, receipt)
or barely audible (consumption, empty, exempt, sumptuous, tempt.)

-pp- /-p- - (poppy – copy) – unpredictable.
                      See Doubled Consonants.

Qu - (quick) - usual spelling for the kw-sound,
                       except:
Acquaint, acquire, acquit.   Choir.

R - (run) - Some words spell the
                   r-sound with wr or rh.
Wrangle, rap/wrap, wrath, wreck, wren, wrench,
                 wrestle, wretch, wreak, wreath, wriggle,
                  ring/wring, wrinkle, wrist, written,
                  right/rite/write, writhe, wrong, wrote,
                  rung/wrung, rye/wry.
Rhythm, rhyme, rhinoceros, rhododendron,
                rhubarb, rheumatism.

-rr- / -r- - (merry – very) – unpredictable.
                      See Doubled Consonants.

S - (set, sit) – An initial s-sound before e, i and y is
                          often spelt c:
Sell/cell, seller/cellar, sent/cent/scent
Celebrate, celery, cellophane, cement, cemetery, centigrade, central, centre, century, certain, certificate, ceremony.
Seen/scene, scenery. Cease, cedar, ceiling, cereal.
Cigar, cigarette, cinder, cinema, circle, circuit, circular, circulate, circumference, circumstance, circus,
cistern, citizen, citrus, city, civic, civil, civilian, civilisation, civilise. Cygnet. Scissors.
Cider, site/cite/sight. Cycle. Science, scythe.

-s- - (nasal) – Inside words, between vowels
                      s in the main spelling for the z-sound,
but with exceptions:
   Bazaar, blazer, brazen, frozen gazelle, hazel, horizon, lozenge, magazine, razor, tweezers. Dozen, hazard, lizard, wizard, wizened. [Pronounced: duzzen, hazzard, lizzard, wizzard, wizzend.]
   Blizzard, buzzard, dizzy. Possess.
Acquisition, busy, chisel, chrysanthemum, closet, cousin, daisy, deposit, desert x2, deserve, design, designate, desire, desolate, diesel, easel, easy, episode, exquisite, fuselage, geyser, hesitate, Joseph, miser, miserable, mosaic, museum, music, nasal, opposite, partisan, peasant, pheasant, physical, physiological, pleasant, poison, position, positive, presence, present, presentation, preserve, president, presumably, prison, proposal, proposition, raisin, realisation, reason, resemble, resentment, reserve, reservoir, residence, resign, resolution, resolve, resort, result, resume, risen, rosette, thousand, treason, visible, visit, weasel.

-se – (wise) - main spelling for a z-sound in endings,
         in at least 200 words, except:
Blaze, craze, crazy, gaze, graze, haze, laze, lazy, maze, raze, amaze.
Breeze, freeze, sneeze, squeeze, wheeze. Trapeze. Seize.
Prize, size, capsize.
Doze, froze, bulldoze. Ooze, booze.
       In US also:
Advertize, agonize, apologize, authorize, baptize, characterize, civilize, computerize, emphasize, fertilize, hypnotize, idolize, memorize, merchandize, organize, realize, recognize, sterilize, synchronize, tantalize (the British -ise suffix spelt -ize).

-ss - (kiss, boss) – in endings, after a stressed short vowel
                              and always in –less and –ness,
except: gas, yes, this, us, bus, plus, thus.
     A few words also use -ss after vowels
which are long in standard UK English: brass, class, glass, pass,
                                                           gross.

-ss- / -c- - (classic – acid) - unpredictable.
                     See Doubled Consonants.

Sh – (ship, fish) – With only a few exceptions
                        at the beginning or end of words:
Chalet, champagne, chandelier, charade,
chef, chivalrous, chute.
Sugar, sure (insure).
Moustache, avalanche, microfiche; liquorice.

In the middle of words the spelling of the
         sh-sound is very irregular.
Bishop, cashew, mushroom, usher, marshal.
     Ancient, appreciate, efficient, sufficient, associated, species. Assure, pressure, issue, tissue.
Crochet, machine, parachute.
     Conscience, fascism. Patient.
(See also –ti- for other endings with sh-sound.)

-si-, -su- - (vision, exposure) - for the relatively uncommon
                     zh-sound:
Asia, conclusion, confusion, decision, diffusion, explosion, division, Indonesia, illusion, invasion, occasion, precision, provision, supervision, vision, (television),
Casual, usual, exposure, leisure, measure, pleasure, treasure.
    With very few exceptions:
Azure, bourgeois, fissure.

T – (top, pot) – Regular in the stem of words and
                         at the end of short words, except:
two, pterodactyl; debt, doubt, subtle.

-tt- / -t- - (latter – lateral) – unpredictable. -
                   See Doubled Consonants.

-tch – (itch) – for ch-sound after short vowels,
                               except:
           rich, which, much, such, touch, attach, detach.

-te – (private) – for final t-sound after a in longer words,
                            except: acrobat, combat, democrat.
A few words have -te after i:
Composite, definite, exquisite, favourite, granite, infinite,
                       opposite.
Bandit, benefit, credit, culprit, deposit, edit, exhibit, explicit, habit, hermit, limit, merit, orbit, profit, prohibit, rabbit, spirit, summit, transit, visit, vomit.
     Biscuit, circuit. Forfeit, surfeit.

th – (this thing) – no other spellings
                          for either of the two sounds.

-ti- - (nation, ambitious, palatial) - main spelling for the
              sh-sound within word endings.
After long a, e, o and u (nation, depletion, notion, solution),
                 there is just one exception: ocean.
There are many exceptions
        before –al (palatial/facial) and
                 –ous (ambitious/delicious),
        after short vowels (ignition/mission) and
        after n and r (mention/pension, portion/version).
Circumstantial, confidential, consequential, credential,
differential, essential, existential, influential, potential,
penitential, preferential, presidential, residential,
reverential, sequential, substantial, torrential.
         Financial, commercial,   controversial.
Facial, glacial, racial, social, crucial.
Palatial, spatial.
      Initial.
     Artificial, beneficial, judicial, official, sacrificial, superficial.
     Special.
Ambitious, fictitious, nutritious, propitious, superstitious,
                  surreptitious.
Auspicious, avaricious, delicious, judicious, malicious, officious, pernicious, suspicious, vicious.
Pugnacious, vivacious, audacious, rapacious, spacious, tenacious, voracious.
Atrocious, ferocious, precocious. Precious.
Conscious, luscious. Anxious.
Facetious. Cautious.
Conscientious, contentious, licentious, pretentious.
Ration. Fashion. Passion.
     Ambition, ammunition, competition, composition,
     condition, definition, edition, exhibition, expedition,
    intuition, opposition, position, proposition, recognition,
     repetition, tradition, transition, tuition.
     Admission, commission, emission, mission,
     permission, transmission, fission.
     Suspicion.
Discussion, percussion. Cushion.
      Attention, convention, detention, intention,
      intervention, invention, mention, prevention.
     Comprehension, condescension, dimension,
      expansion, extension, mansion, pension,
      suspension, tension.
Portion, proportion, extortion.
Aspersion, conversion, dispersion, diversion, immersion, inversion, subversion, version, excursion, incursion.
Coercion.

U – (up) - has many exceptions.
                   Next to m, n and v
u is often spelt o or o-e (month, money*, love),
      * with some words, such as ‘money’ and ‘honey’ also
          missing a doubled consonant (cf. funny bunny).
Mum, mummy, mug, mumps, must, much, mustard, mutt, mutter.
Chum, drum, glum, hum, sum, swum.
Clump, dump, hump, jump, lump, scrum, strum, stump.
     Monday, money*, monger, mongrel, monk, monkey, month,
     mother, smother.
     Come, some. Comfort, company, compass, pommel, stomach*.
Nut, snug. Fun, gun, nun, run, spun, stun, sun.
Bung, flung, hung, lung, rung, sprung, strung, stung, sung, swung.
Bunk, drunk, junk sunk.   Blunt, grunt, hunt, stunt.   Bunny, funny.
     Nothing. Son, ton.   Among, front, tongue, sponge.
     Done, none, one[wun].   Honey*, onion*.
     Won, wonder. Once [wunce].
    Above, cover*, covet*, covey*, covenant*, dove, glove,
     govern*, love, oven*, shove, shovel*, slovenly*.
           Country, nourish*, young. Enough.
A few other words have tricky spellings for the short u-sound,
           without being next to m, n or v:
Bubble, rubble, stubble. - Double*, trouble.
Bud, mud, thud. - Blood, flood.
Bluff, cuff, gruff, puff, stuff. - Rough, slough, tough.
Buzzing. - Cousin*, dozen*.
Culture, dust, supper. - Colour*, does. Southern.
                                               Hiccough [hickup].
Current, hurry, turret. - Courage*, thorough*.
Hurry. - Worry.
Such. – Touch.
Supple. – Couple*.
Utter. - Other, brother.

u - e, -ue – (tube, tuba; due) – In the stem of words the
                        'open u'  spelling has relatively few exceptions.
Use, units...       - Eucalyptus. you/ewe/yew, youth, ewer.
Assuage, fuel... - Sewage, jewel, steward.
Nude               - Feud, feudal, neutral, pneumatic, pseudo,
Cumin              - rheumatism.
Luminous         - Lewd, newt, pewter.
Duke                 - Nuclear.
Duty                  - Beauty. Suitable, suitcase.
Reduce …        - Juice, nuisance, suicide.
Muse, music… - Tuesday.
       In endings the spelling of this sound is more varied:
Cue/queue,   due/dew,   sue.
Argue, avenue, barbecue, continue, imbue, issue, pursue,
           rescue, revenue, statue, subdue, tissue,
           value, devalue, venue, virtue.
Chew, few, Jew, knew, new, pew, spew, stew.
           Askew, curfew, curlew, mildew, nephew.
View, interview, review.
Emu, menu.

V, -ve - (vet, have, given) - regular
                                      but exceptional:
1) V is generally not doubled,
         except in a few modern words (bevvy, chivvy),
         regardless of the length of the vowel before it:
        even/seven; liver/driver (cf. dinner /diner).
2) A final –v is accompanied by –e
       (e.g. have/gave, give/drive),
      irrespective of the length of the vowel before it
        (cf. hat /hate, bit /bite), except ‘spiv’.
3) A short u-sound next to v tends to be spelt o: glove, lover*.
        *The spelling of o for short u, was introduced
         before the invention of printing and
          before the letter v was added to the English alphabet.
Until then u was used for spelling both the u- and v-sounds. In handwritten texts reading several short, straight strokes next to each other, as in luue [love] could be difficult. For this reason early scribes often spelt short u as o.

W - (wet, win) - has the following
       exceptions:
Whack, whale, wharf, what.
Whelk, when, where/wear, whether/weather, whey, overwhelm. Wheedle, wheel, wheeze.
Whiff, whimper, whip, whirl, whirring, whisk, whiskers, whisky/whiskey, whisper, which, whistle, whiz. While, whilst, wine/whine, white, why. Whoosh.

X – (exit, fix) – main spelling for the ks-sound,
                          with the exceptions:
Accent, accept, access, accelerate, accident.
            Eccentric. Success, succeed, succinct.
Excellent, except, excess, exceed, excite.
Exhibition.
              In a few words x is pronounced gz:
Anxiety, exact, exaggerate, examine, example, exasperate, exert, exist,   exhaust.

Y, -y, --y – (yes, my, bunny)
                   Not many English words begin with y:
Yacht, yahoo, yak, yap, yard, yarn, yawn, yeah, yearn, yeast, yell, yellow, yelp, yes, yesterday, yet, yeti, yew, yield, yodel, yoga, yoghurt, yoke/yolk, you, young, youth, your, yurt.
    An initial yoo-sound is spelt mainly with an open u
    (apart from 'yew/ you/ ewe' and 'youth')
Ubiquitous, ukulele, unicycle, uniform, unilateral, union, unique, unisex, unison, unit, united, unity, universal, universe, university, uranium, urine, usable/useable, usage, use, useful, usual, usurp, usury, utensil, uterus, utilise, utilities.

--y – (baby, boldly) – Hundreds of words use
                --y for an unstressed final ee-sound,
           except:
Abbey, alley, attorney, bogey, chimney, chutney, cockney, covey, donkey, hockey, holey, honey, Jersey, jockey, journey, kidney, medley, money, monkey, parsley, pulley, story/storey, trolley, turkey, valley, volley, whisky/whiskey (US).
   Brownie, budgie, caddie, collie, cookie, eerie, genie, movie, pixie, prairie, wheelie.

-y - (fly) –y is also the most frequent spelling for a
                             stressed final ie-sound,
       but with exceptions:
By/buy/bye, cry, dry, fly, fry, my, ply, pry, shy, sky, sly, spy, sty, thy, try, why, wry.
     Ally, apply, deny, supply, magnify, multiply, verify. (Cf. daddy, mummy...)
Die/dye, lie, pie, tie, vie. High, nigh, sigh, thigh. Rye. Guy.

Z - (zap, rise) – Few English words begin with z
      (zany, zap, zeal, zebra, zenith, zero, zest, zigzag, zinc, zip, zither,
       zodiac, zone, zoo, zoom, Zulu)
       and the only exception is: xylophone.
In the middle of words
       the main spelling for the z-sound is s (desire, result) and in
endings –se (rise). - (See -s- and –se.)

-zz- / -z- / -s- - (dizzy –lizard - risen) – unpredictable. -
                            See Doubled Consonants.

All the words above are also listed in my booklet
'Rules and Exceptions of English Spelling'
published by Pegasus in 2009

Index

2010-05-18T23:35:00.000-07:00

Who decides how we spell?

2010-05-04T03:08:00.000-07:00

Many countries have official bodies which keep an eye on the health of their spelling, such as the Academie in France, or the Deutsche Sprachgesellschaft shared by German-speaking countries. People contact them about spellings which make learning to read and write too difficult, or cause too many spelling errors. From time to time, these venerated organisations then recommend spelling changes for tackling them, in some countries more often than others. They reflect how much people care about the ease with which children can learn to read and write.

The Scandinavian countries, with the exception of Denmark, have all tried to make learning to read and write progressively easier. Finland has made its spelling so simple that its literacy acquisition is literally as easy as child’s play now.

Holland and all the German-speaking countries have also gradually made learning to read and write easier, since about 1800. The last German spelling reform was in 2005. After centuries of doing very little, the French Academy has recently also begun to consider which French spelling irregularities hinder literacy acquisition. Portugal decided last year to adopt the spelling changes which Brazil introduced first, and which have substantially speeded up literacy learning there.

There is no organisation which watches over the soundness of English spelling. Speakers of English regard dictionaries as the arbiters on spelling. Yet dictionary publishers claim that they merely list the spellings which are most commonly used. For many words which have no clearly dominant or ‘correct’ spelling, such as ‘bannister / banister’ or ‘pastie / pasty’, they to give both.

This suggests that if enough people decided to spell some of the words which make learning to read and write English much harder than need be (e.g. have, give, live, friend, many, pretty, women) more sensibly (e.g. hav, giv, liv, frend, menny, pritty, wimmen), then dictionaries would soon follow suit. In reality, most speakers of English obey dictionaries as if they were god-given and would not dream of challenging their authority. They even feel uncomfortable about discussing the rightness or wrongness of English spelling, almost like religious believers react to having their beliefs questioned.

Because I was not born to English-speaking parents and did not meet English spelling until the age of 14, its many imperfections became more readily obvious to me from the moment I began to learn it. I could immediately see that they made learning to read and write much harder than Lithuanian and Russian. Our teachers, too, made us constantly aware that English did not use letters like other alphabetic writing systems do, and that trying to fathom out the logic of English spelling was unprofitable.

I found out where most English words came from when I went on to learn German, French, Italian and Spanish. This also showed me how much English spelling needlessly abuses the alphabetic principle. For example, the English words ‘mother’ and ‘brother’, clearly derive from the same Germanic roots as the German words ‘Mutter’ and ‘Bruder’, yet in English they have perversely ended up with ‘o’ for the short U-sound, instead of ‘u’. The modern German cousins of the English words ‘brought, daughter, laugh’, with their tricky spellings, have been amended in accordance with their changed pronunciation and cause neither reading nor spelling difficulties (brachte, Tochter, lachen).

Most English imports from French now have sensible spellings (beef, budge, mustard – from ‘boeuf, bouger, moutarde’), but too many are still spelt according to French rather than English rules (double, group, touch). This is true of many other foreign imports into English too. For ease of learning, the words ‘photo’ and ‘telephone’ have been respelt with ‘f’ for the F-sound in both Spanish and German, while English insists on keeping the more difficult ’ph’.

When I became a teacher of English and modern languages in Dorset in 1976, I discovered that English spelling inconsistencies gave native speakers of English nearly as much trouble as they had done to me as a foreigner. Now that I have spent over 15 years studying English spelling irregularities and the educational harm which they do, I am beginning to find it hard to desist from suggesting some improvements.

English spelling irregularities aggravate dyslexia

2010-04-27T23:19:00.000-07:00

The term ‘dyslexia’ was first coined in 1887 to distinguish highly intelligent people with reading and writing difficulties from poor readers and writers of low ability. The diagnosis tends to be sought after by parents mainly because it can improve a child’s chances of receiving individual help. It is often also seen as proof that the sufferer is not stupid, despite having literacy problems.

Irrespective of the sufferer’s general intellectual ability, the term signifies mainly above-average problems with learning to read and write which tend to manifest themselves as:
below average phonological processing skills
poorer decoding ability
a weaker working memory.

Phonological processing skills are essential for identifying speech sounds, rhymes and alliterations and for breaking words up into their separate sounds, such as ‘b – e – d’ or ‘sh – o – p’. Dyslexics find all those things more difficult and are also more prone to both letter and sound reversals, such as writing ‘d’ for ‘b’ and turning ‘bed’ into ‘deb’ or ‘god’ into ‘dog’, in both speech and writing.

Decoding is a fundamental part of learning to read. It consists of learning the sounds which the letters or letter strings of a writing system make, in other words, the learning of alphabetic codes. Dyslexics need longer for this in all languages, but in English much more so.

A weaker working memory impedes the ability to keep items in short-term memory when speaking, listening, reading or writing. This is a greater handicap in learning to read English than other languages, as I will explain shortly. It also makes rote-learning more difficult.

All the above learning difficulties are bigger impediments in learning to read and write English than in languages with better spelling systems. Learning to link letters to sounds and sounds to letters is clearly vastly easier when letters have just one sound, such as the ee in ‘keep sleep deep’, and sounds that have just one spelling, as most English consonants do (bob, dad, pip).

Anyone who finds it harder than most to master decoding is inevitably going to find it even harder with letters that keep changing their sounds, such as the ‘o’ in ‘to do so’, the ‘a’ in ‘and any apron’ or the ‘ea’ in ‘treat great threat’. They cause problems for many learners with good decoding skills too, but for dyslexics, they are especially problematic. For them they are as challenging as extremely small print is for the visually impaired.

The plight of dyslexics is greatly aggravated by most English vowel spellings not being reversible. Learning the sounds which an English vowel spelling can have, such as the ‘o’ in ‘on – only - once - other’ does not enable learners to spell those sounds correctly in other words (cough, sausage - moan, bone - one, won - up, double).

In other words, in English, learning to read is not nearly as helpful for learning to spell as it is in other languages. Because dyslectics tend to have difficulties with rote-learning, the word-by-word memorization of unpredictable English spellings in at least 3695 common words causes them even greater problems than for most learners.

The weaker working memory of dyslectics makes learning to read the 103 English words which have different sounds in different contexts, such as ‘I read a little most days, but last night I read for as couple of hours’, especially difficult. We can only read such words correctly by taking note of the words which follow or precede them, and holding this information in our short-term memory store, which dyslexics find harder than most.

The inconsistencies of English spelling make literacy acquisition slower and harder for everyone, but especially for learners with any kind of learning difficulty. Unsurprisingly, most dyslexia research has been carried out in English-speaking countries. In other languages, there are far fewer people with literacy problems and therefore also few researchers interested in investigating them.

How English spelling became so irregular

2010-04-12T03:49:00.000-07:00

The first English writing system was developed in the 7th century, after St. Augustine brought Latin to England in 597. The language and spelling have both changed a great deal since then. They did not start to resemble current usage until 1348, when a series of plagues helped to end French domination over England and the English language. The system from which current English spelling conventions have developed was established mainly by the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who died in 1400.

Sadly, his orthography began to be diluted almost as soon as he had created it. English became re-instated as the official language of England around 1430, after the 100 years war with France ended, and many of the scribes and clerks of court, who had hitherto written only French or Latin, had trouble switching to it. Their difficulties are chiefly responsible for most of the still surviving French spellings in words of French origin (table, double, centre) and spelling inconsistencies, such as ‘label - table’, ‘bubble – double’, ‘enter – centre’. Most words of French descent have been respellt to show their changed, anglicised pronunciation (e.g. ‘beef, batter, battle, count, government, mountain’ - from ‘boeuf, battre, bataille, compter, gouvernement, montagne’)

Chaucer’s spelling system became even more seriously corrupted after 1476, when Caxton returned to London after 30 years on the Continent, to set up the first English printing press. To help him in this enterprise, he brought with him printers from Belgium who spoke little or no English and made numerous spelling errors (e.g. ‘any, busy, citie’ for ‘eny, bisy, cittie’).

They were also paid by the line and fond of lengthening words to earn more money, or to make margins look neater. Many words with earlier simpler spellings became more complex and longer (frend – friend, hed – head, seson – season; fondnes – fondnesse, bad – badde, shal – shall).

The biggest dilution of English spelling patterns, however, occurred in the 16th century, during the printing of the first English bibles. They were printed abroad, because English bishops supported the Pope’s ban on translating the holy writ from Latin into native languages. After Martin Luther’s public questioning of the Pope’s infallibility in 1517 in Germany, many English people began to want to know exactly what the bible said, instead of just hearing about it from priests in their Sunday sermons. William Tyndale translated it, but he had to leave England to do so.

Tyndale had to live in hiding, moving between Germany, Holland and Belgium, because spies in the employ of Sir Thomas More were constantly trying to track him down. His writings were therefore also printed abroad by people who spoke no English.

They were also much reprinted, because English bishops kept having them searched out, bought up and brought back for public burning outside St. Paul’s cathedral in London. With repeated copying, from increasingly corrupt copies, bible spellings became more and more varied. Yet they were the first and only book that many families ever bought, and learned to read and write from too.

When Sir Thomas More’s spies did finally manage to track Tyndale down and have him hanged and then burnt at the stake near Brussels in 1536, printers began to change his spellings even more, along with his name, in order to disguise his authorship. By the second half of the 16th century English spelling had consequently become very chaotic, with hardly anyone knowing what its rules were. Elizabethan manuscripts consequently became full of different spellings for identical words, on the same page, even including the Queen’s own writings and the first authorised bible of 1611.

The spelling mess created during the first 100 years of English printing, mainly by foreign printers without any knowledge of English, led to calls for the standardisation of English spelling. The first step towards this was taken by teachers who began to compile spelling lists for their pupils. One of them, Edmond Coote, published his in 1595 and called it ‘The English Schoolemaister’. It saved others the trouble, became very popular and also highly influential.

Coote cut many surplus letters inserted by printers (e.g. hadde – had, worde – word). He was greatly assisted by pamphleteers of the English Civil War (1642-9) who liked words to be shorter in order to pack as much information onto a page as possible.

Unfortunately, they did not get rid of all surplus letters, and nearly all that escaped their 17th C culling survive still (e.g. have, well, fuss, friend, build). Coote also paid no heed to the regularity of English spelling or ease of mastering it. His main aim was to help establish a single spelling for each word, opting for the one most often used.

When Samuel Johnson began work on his famous dictionary of 1755, quite a few English words still had more than one spelling, such as ‘thare, there, thair, ther, their’. He decided to link several hundred alternative spellings to differences in meaning, as was already beginning to happen, and thereby helped to make learning to spell English even more difficult. Mercifully, he did not apply this to at least 2000 others, such as ‘arm/arme, mean/mene’.

Proof that reform would make a difference

2010-04-01T04:22:00.000-07:00

Nowadays few people give much thought to the idea of spelling reform. Until a few decades ago, it attracted far more interest, particularly in the UK. In 1953 the House of Commons even passed all three stages of a private member's Spelling Reform Bill. But without government support, the Bill had no chance of being passed by the House of Lords. Its success in the Commons did however persuade the then Secretary of State for Education, Miss Florence Horsbrugh, to fund research to establish if traditional spelling really did impede children's progress with learning to read and write.

The London Institute of Education and the National Foundation for Educational Research were entrusted with the project. It took them several years to prepare the requisite new teaching materials and persuade enough head teachers to take part in the experiment, but in 1963-64 the carefully designed one-year study was eventually carried out. It compared the literacy learning and general educational progress of 873 children who learned to read and write with traditional English spelling and an equal number who were taught with the more regular spellings of the Initial Teaching Alphabet http://www.omniglot.com/writing/i.t.a..htm.

The study proved very clearly that traditional spelling impedes children's literacy progress, when compared with the use of a more consistent spelling system. It left no doubt that if English spelling were to be improved, we would reduce the literacy problems which so many children exhibit now.

Children using i.t.a. learned to read far more easily and much faster. They also read more fluently, made fewer errors and gained higher comprehension scores. None matched the very poor progress made by several children learning with traditional spelling.

The writing of children on i.t.a. was also superior. Their compositions were longer and contained a much wider vocabulary. They also showed more enthusiasm for learning, not just of reading and writing, but all subjects.

So why are these research findings not better known?
After the study, many schools continued to use i.t.a. - in the hope of obviating the need for spelling reform. This was due largely to Sir James Pitman’s powers of persuasion.

Pitman was aware that learning to read and write English was harder than other languages, but he was not keen on spelling reform and thought that he had found a means of circumventing it. He had become convinced that a temporary use of the more regular i.t.a. spelling system would give children a sure grasp of the alphabetic principle, and that this foundation would enable them to cope more easily with the many irregular English letter-to-sound relationships, when they eventually met them.

It didn’t. Learning to understand how alphabets are generally used, with the temporary use of i.t.a., did not help children to cope with English spelling irregularities any better than my understanding of the alphabetic principle, grasped from the regular letter-to-sound relationships of Lithuanian and Russian, helped me cope with English inconsistencies on meeting them at the age of 14. The ablest pupils suffered little harm from the interim use of i.t.a., but slower ones regressed severely on switching to normal English spelling.

Unfortunately, once schools had embarked on this experiment, they tended to persevere with it for many years, despite growing evidence that it did not help to improve literacy standards. Teachers became embroiled in disputes about the implementation of i.t.a., how long it should be used and how the switch to normal spelling was best managed.

They found it hard to believe that Sir James Pitman had been wrong, along with some other prominent individuals. Sir Allan Bullock who in 1975 produced a government-commissioned report on reading and writing standards in the UK, had also recommended that school should try i.t.a..

On 2 June 2001 a whole-page spread in the Daily Telegraph rightly described the use of i.t.a. as "a cleer case of educashunal lunacie". But sadly, it made no reference to the 1953 Spelling Reform Bill or the 1963-4 research which proved beyond a shadow of doubt that improvements to English spelling would make learning to read and write much faster and easier.

A major cause of children’s misery

2010-03-29T02:29:00.000-07:00

In February 2007, the United Nations Children's Fund reported that British pupils were the unhappiest in the western world, followed by those in the US. This led one British teachers’ union to call for an independent Royal Commission to investigate why so many British children are so unhappy.

One major cause of many children’s unhappiness is undoubtedly poverty. Sadly, it afflicts more children in both the US and the UK than in other developed countries. In the UK the relentless expansion of academic testing over the past decade has probably made the school lives of many children more miserable too. But might English spelling inconsistencies not be making a substantial contribution too?

Nearly all children start school with a keen desire to learn, but for many English-speaking ones the early school years are exceptionally trying. The irregularities of English spelling make learning to read and write, the skill which they need learn first, especially difficult. They offer them far more opportunities for failure than better orthographies do.

The majority of English-speaking children begin learning to read with as much enthusiasm as elsewhere. But as soon as they start to grasp basic English letter-to-sound correspondences with words such as "on, hot, spot", teachers begin to confuse them with exceptions like "once, only, other". As soon as they try to apply their phonic knowledge, gleaned from words such as "bed, end, up", to write other everyday words like "said, friend, mother", they discover that at least half of them do not follow basic rules, but require word-by-word memorisation of illogical quirks.

Such constant and baffling rule-breaking causes what psychologists call ‘cognitive confusion’ and can quickly leave many pupils bewildered and disenchanted. The old phrase ‘nothing succeeds like success’ applies to young children most of all. Too much scope for failure does the opposite. In reading, repeated stumbling over words like ‘who, would, people’ makes keeping going more difficult. In writing, discovering over and over again that perfectly logical spellings like ‘sed, frend, muther’ are unacceptable, soon begins to undermine both confidence and motivation in many children, along with their enjoyment of school.

Early years teachers refrain from correcting every sensible but ‘incorrect’ attempt at spelling by young children, in order to stop them being put off writing too readily. Before long however, other teachers have to start training them out of simply spelling logically and teach them to spell ‘correctly’ instead. Children start being made to learn from their mistakes - mistakes which they would mostly not make if English spelling was more sensible.

With better writing systems, children have much higher chances of spelling correctly from first starting to learn this skill. Logical application of rules does not constantly lead to ‘mistakes’, as in English. It is rewarded with success instead. Teachers don’t need to keep correcting children, for merely trying to be sensible, nearly as much as they do in English.

Everyone reading this blog has managed to learn to read and probably learned to write without too much trouble. Consequently their school experience was most likely also a relatively happy one. But it really is not difficult to understand that for pupils who never quite get to grips with reading and writing, the school years offer great scope for misery.

Every surplus letter, as in ‘beautiful, friend, head’ (cf ‘duty, end, bed’), along with every wrong one, as in ‘pretty, busy, English’ (cf ‘ditty, dizzy, in’), and every missing one, as in ‘very, copy, melon’ (cf ‘merry, poppy, mellow’) makes the lives of all English-speaking children more miserable than need be. With lack of support and encouragement from home, they are especially effective for making children educationally unsuccessful and unhappy.

Worse for boys

2010-03-22T23:29:00.000-07:00

One result which has become increasingly clear with the regular testing of literacy skills in the UK and US is that girls tend to do better than boys. A study released by CEP in the US in March 2010 - "State Test Score Trends Through 2007-08: Are There Differences in Achievement Between Boys and Girls?" - concluded that ‘the lagging performance by boys in reading is the most pressing gender-gap issue facing our schools’. They found greater gender differences in some of the 50 US states than others, but in none did boys read better than girls.

In maths, by contrast, the number of states in which girls outperformed boys was roughly equal to the number of states in which boys outperformed girls. At the advanced level, 4th-grade boys outperformed girls in maths in most states.

The national SATs results for 11-year-olds in England in 2009 were similar: girls were way ahead of boys in reading (89 per cent of girls reached the expected standard as opposed to 82 per cent of boys) and in writing (75 per cent and 60 per cent respectively). Boys were slightly ahead of girls in maths (79 per cent compared to 78 per cent).

Why should boys be as good or better than girls in maths but worse in reading?

From my undergraduate study of child development in the late 1960’s, and close observation of my own children and grandchildren, I have learnt that, on the whole, the physical and verbal development of young boys is slightly slower than that of girls. By the start of formal schooling, which in the UK is now sometimes as early as age 4, most boys are therefore less school-ready than girls.

Verbal ability is a very important factor in learning to read English. So is internalising the grammatical structures of the language. They both help with part-guessing the many English words with tricky spellings which are not entirely decodable, such as ‘said, would, one’ in phrases like ‘One day he said that he would...’.

Because boys tend to be slightly behind girls in those things, their start to schooling is both harder and less successful, and probably less enjoyable too. Being able to do something that we are expected to do is much more fun than finding it difficult or impossible. The early start to schooling in Anglophone countries is therefore much harder for boys than girls, and it seems to keep them at a disadvantage for many years.

The fact that boys tend to outperform girls in maths, suggests that their minds are more logical. This probably makes the many irregularities of English spelling harder for them to cope with, not just at the start of schooling but throughout their school years.

Somewhat unusually for a female, I was very good in maths at school. And I was very upset by English spelling inconsistencies on first meeting them at the age of 14. My son who ended up studying science certainly found coping with them much harder than my daughter who loved and chose languages.

The greater testing burden

2010-03-15T03:00:00.000-07:00

In addition to the learning and teaching difficulties and the extra pressures on pupils, teachers and parents which the inconsistencies of English spelling create, they also entail much more testing. In languages which children can learn to read in about 3 to 6 months, nobody thinks of regularly testing their reading skills, any more than we would consider repeatedly testing toddlers’ ability to walk.

English-speaking pupils keep having their reading ability tested, because learning to read English takes years rather than just weeks or months. The longer learning time gives them far more scope to fall seriously behind their classmates, and literacy problems get harder to remedy, the longer they are left unattended (as I explained on 4 February). Regular testing of reading has therefore become well-established in all English-speaking primary and grade schools.

Until a couple of decades ago, the results of reading assessment were used mainly for identifying children who needed extra help or those who should be set more challenging work. In the UK and US, simultaneously administered tests for certain year groups, such as 7, 11 and 14, have also been used for monitoring standards at national and international level.

Because national tests kept identifying worryingly high levels of functional illiteracy (and innumeracy), governments increasingly also began to use testing as a means of driving up standards. In the UK test results are now published as school league tables. Schools in which a high percentage of pupils do not achieve government literacy and numeracy targets are labelled as ‘failing’, put into special measures and threatened with closure, with the aim of making teachers squeeze more effort out of their pupils.

Unfortunately, the publication and ranking of test results also helps to determine what kind of pupils a school can attract. Given a choice, parents naturally prefer to send their children to a school that is rated good or excellent rather than poor. This right is, however, exercised mainly by shrewder, wealthier and better-informed parents who generally also put more effort into supporting their children’s education and whose offspring tend to do relatively well in tests and examinations.

The high-ranking schools therefore gradually attract more and more well-performing children. Those with poorer scores are increasingly left with poorer pupils. They find it progressively harder to improve their test results. They also have more trouble attracting enough good teachers, because working in them can be extremely challenging.

Teacher comments on US educational websites, such as http://www.reading.org, suggest that things are now moving in the same more test-heavy direction there too. American politicians are as desperate to raise educational attainment as British ones, because a better educated workforce is believed to be crucial to the economic future of both countries.

In Britain, the use of testing for driving up overall national educational performance has been ineffective, despite government ministers often claiming that it has. They cite the spectacular changes in the Sats (Standard Assessment Tests) scores of UK 11-year-olds between 1997 and 2009 as evidence for their claim: in 1997 just 63% had attained level 4 in English; by 2009 this had risen to 80%. Isn’t this clear proof of the efficacy of Labour education policies over that period?

A closer study of the UK Sats results reveals that much of the 17% ‘improvement’ in the English SATs scores between 1998 and 2009 was achieved simply by the introduction of new tests in 1999. It produced a 7% gain from 1998 and 1999 (64% to 71%), and a further 4% the following year (71% to 75%). This spectacular 11% increase over two years was, however, followed by complete stagnation for the next three years, and only minimal improvement since (75% in 2003 to 80% in 2009), which may well be due entirely teachers simply getting better at preparing their students for the tests. There have been regular reports of cheating too. When the reputation of teachers depends on their students’ test scores, they are inevitably inclined to lend a helping hand.

Most English secondary schools have continued to use their own tests for assessing new entrants and have not registered any dramatic improvements in their literacy standards between 1997 and 2009. Independent monitors, such as the CEM at the University of Durham, have also failed to do so.

Pressures on parents

2010-02-17T03:48:00.000-08:00

I explained in my last post that our son struggled with learning to read. As university educated parents, we did our best to support him. His teacher used to write the words which regularly gave him trouble such as ‘said, through, people’, on little cards and put them in a small tin, to take home for more practice. He was not fond of this, but we kept asking to see the tin and patiently persevered with helping him to decipher the tricky words and to memorise them.

We were typical of most middle class parents - taking a keen interest in our children’s learning and doing all we could to help them. A 2007 survey by the Open University found that a third of middle class parents were so interested in their children’s homework that their offspring never mentioned it at home to reduce their involvement. None of them had any difficulty getting help if they needed it. Among children from poorer homes by contrast, one fifth never got any help with their homework at all.

In the Cambridge Review of Primary Education, Professor Robin Alexander reported in 2009 that conversation in the home and regular reading of bedtime stories affected children’s educational progress more than anything else. Researchers for the Sutton Trust have just reported that, children from the poorest homes are almost a year behind middle class pupils by the time they start school”, but that “good parenting, such as reading to children and having fixed bed times”, is the best way to reduce the gap.

Over the last decade, the UK government has financed several TV campaigns to encourage parents to talk and read to their children, especially fathers to sons. It has also begun regular free distributions of books to pre-school children, and it expects teachers to send books home with their pupils for reading aloud to their parents.

For the 1 in 5 parents, however, who are functionally illiterate, doing all that the government would like them to is much harder than for educated middle-class ones. A 2007 survey by the adult learning organisation Learndirect found that 1 in 10 parents struggled to understand the bedtime stories they read to their children. Almost a quarter admitted to skipping passages they could not read, or inventing words to cover up their problems. Jean Gross, the UK’s newly appointed tsar for language development, has also pointed out that in some deprived areas of the UK, 60-75% of parents do not know how to communicate with their children (TES 12 Feb). The long and unsocial hours which many poorer parents often work, also make it harder for them to be more supportive of their children’s learning.

Would there be so much pressure, on all English-speaking parents, to get children reading-ready, and to help with learning to read once they start school, if learning to read English was not so uniquely difficult? In Finland, which has the simplest writing system in Europe, parents are actively discouraged from teaching their children to read before they start formal schooling at 7. They prefer all beginners to start on the same level.

When learning to read is easy, even children whose preschool experiences were not particularly conducive to learning to read, can do so quickly and without parental help. They can then immediately begin to use reading for independent improvement of their general linguistic skills, as I did with Lithuanian. Growing up in a remote village under Soviet rule, with my mother having to work full-time, I was looked after by my almost deaf Lithuanian grandmother and spent most of my time playing and roaming outdoors, with a few other children who were also waiting to start school at 7. Yet learning to read Lithuanian, once I was at school, took me just a couple of weeks, even though my mother spoke only German.

In English, readiness and parental help with reading are so much more crucial, only because many words are not entirely decodable (‘I read every day, and I read last night’; ‘although tough, plough through’). For children with poor speaking skills and little home support, learning to read such words is extremely difficult.

In addition to helping their children with learning to read, educated parents also tend to assist their children’s reading progress by instilling a love of reading - by being seen to read themselves. A survey by the organisers of the Orange prize for fiction discovered in 2003 that 4 out of 10 British adults never read anything for pleasure. For the children of such parents, it is much harder to keep persevering when they find the going very difficult. I dread to think what happens to children like our son, if born to parents who can’t give their offspring the assistance we gave.

Pressure for an early start

2010-02-15T03:41:00.000-08:00

In the ‘Independent review of the teaching of early reading’, which was commissioned by the UK government, Sir Jim Rose recommend in 2006 that children should ideally start school after their 4th birthday and that the teaching of phonics (learning to sound out letters and common letter strings for reading and writing simple words) should start as soon as possible after that. He explained why:
‘an appropriate introduction to phonic work by the age of five enables our children to cover ground that many of their counterparts in countries whose language is much less complex phonetically do not have to cover”.

Like most people, Sir Jim Rose confuses ‘language’ with ‘spelling’, but he is right, about the English literacy learning burden being much heavier than in most other languages. The cross-European research led by Philip Seymour (2003) established that English spelling inconsistencies ensure that English-speaking children take nearly three times longer than the European average (of one year) to master the basics of reading and writing, despite the English language being one of the simplest in the world.

Because English literacy acquisition takes so much longer, it makes logical sense to begin teaching children to read and write from a relatively young age. Nobody can learn much without acquiring at least basic literacy skills first. If English-speaking children began learning them at 6 or 7, as other Europeans do, they would start their general education much later than most. There is also plenty of evidence that the best readers and spellers nearly all start learning to read and write very early at home.

Yet incredible though it may seem, whenever English literacy problems and educational underachievement attract another bout of media coverage, quite a few otherwise sensible people, such as Professor Alan Smithers, suggest that they are due to English-speaking children being made to start learning to read and write too early. They point out that Finland is consistently near the top in international educational league tables, yet does not begin formal schooling until 7.

Making children learn any skill before they are mature enough for it is generally accepted as a bad idea. But how long should you delay the start to learning a skill that is undoubtedly going to take a very long time master, often makes no logical sense, but is crucial for all other learning? The Seymour research established not only that English literacy acquisition took longer, but also that this was not due to English literacy learning starting exceptionally early.

Learning to read, with some letters having different sounds in at least 2000 common words (one, bone, gone) and 3700 words having unpredictable spellings (roll, coal, bowl) – as can be seen at www.englishspellingproblems.co.uk - takes a long time, no matter how late pupils start to tackle this burden. It may even be easier to accept English spelling irregularities more readily if children are introduced them before their reasoning skills become too developed. Perhaps I found the lack of logic in English spelling more distracting, because I did not encounter them until the age of 14, and immediately found it blatantly obvious and annoying?

Given the great English literacy learning burden, allowing children to begin tackling it, as soon as they are ready, therefore seems a good idea. Unfortunately, many children are not ready for it, by 4, 5 or even 6.

Our daughter first began to show a keen interest in learning to read at 3½. With a little help from me and a few Ladybird ‘John and Jane’ books, she became fluent long before she turned 5. She also confirmed the theory that early readers learn to spell without much difficulty.

Our son, by contrast, was not even particularly fond of being read to until he was nearly 5. He much preferred to be left to play with his Lego. Trying to teach him to read before he started school would have been traumatic for him and us. At school, his reading progress was laborious, and in sharp contrast to his love of maths. He needed a great deal of patient help and cajoling at home, to keep going. And although he eventually came to enjoy reading more than most, English spelling quirks still trip him up occasionally, even in adulthood. Both children went to Cambridge, she to study modern languages, he natural sciences.

When a spelling system requires children ‘to cover ground that many of their counterparts ... do not have to cover”, pressure to start literacy learning early is inevitable. It makes it much more difficult to give children the sort of leisurely childhood enjoyed by most Europeans, and which would be better for many English-speaking ones too.

Teacher training is trickier

2010-02-10T23:41:00.000-08:00

When all spellings have reliable sounds and the total number of spellings used is only 50 or fewer, as in all European languages other than English, teaching children to read needs very little training. Almost any literate adult can do it. It took my grandmother just a couple of weeks to teach me the sounds of Lithuanian letters and their common combinations, and I was able to carry on improving without further individual help from anyone. Most European languages can be learned equally easily. In Spain, nearly all children learn to read before they start school.

Because English uses 185 spellings, 69 of which have variable sounds (as shown in my Dec 09 postings) and make learning to read much harder, it has to be taught by well-trained professionals. Government surveys in the UK have nearly all blamed its disappointing literacy levels on inadequate teacher training and poor teaching (e.g. Bullock [1975], Moser [1999] and Rose [2006]).

Unfortunately, there is no complete agreement on what the best method for teaching reading is. There have been intense disagreements about it in all English-speaking countries since the 1950’s, ever since literacy standards began to be more carefully monitored and have invariably been found disappointing. Government advice on literacy teaching has since been repeatedly modified.

Prior to the 1950’s, the approach was mainly that recommended by James Dunn in his 1766 book 'The Best Method of Teaching to Read and Spell English':
1) begin with words that are absolutely regular,
in the sense that they are pronounced in the way children would expect;
2) build into the exercises material that unobtrusively revises earlier work;
3) give special emphasis to the pronunciation of c and g, the first big difficulty;
introduce other difficulties progressively.

This common-sense method is quite similar to what is now called ‘phonics’ and which is in general use for initial literacy teaching once again. For most children, it works well. Teachers began to look for new approaches in the 1950’s only because regular testing was revealing that it left around 1 in 5 pupils functionally illiterate.

Some schools tried introducing children to real books much earlier than was normal practice, reducing the use of specially constructed phonic texts which tend to be rather tedious. Others experimented with teaching more whole-word reading, with less emphasis on the sounding out of letters. Some schools even used a more regular way of spelling English (the Initial Teaching Alphabet, or i.t.a.) for the first year of literacy teaching, before switching to traditional spelling.

Such experiments were carried out for several decades in all English-speaking countries, but since the early 1990’s, there has been a gradual return to greater use of phonics. The different experimental approaches did not reduce the 20% level of functional illiteracy any better than the 250-year-old traditional approach. But although phonics is now the most used method for initial literacy teaching in all Anglophone countries again, there is still lack of complete unanimity on the subject among teachers and education experts.

There is disagreement about how early phonics teaching should begin, how long it should last and which particular phonic method is best (synthetic versus analytic). Publishers have produced many different phonic schemes, and deciding which one to adopt has become the latest headache for teachers. When they are doing what they are advised to do and working as hard as they can, but some of their pupils still continue to have serious difficulties with learning to read and write, it is easy to think that they must be using the wrong teaching materials.

The fact that spelling inconsistencies make learning to read and write English uniquely difficult tends to be ignored. Many prominent advocates of phonics, such Debbie Hepplewhite in the UK, concede, “If only the code was as simple as a letter, or group of letters, representing any one particular phoneme, then the teaching and learning of the code would be speedy and straightforward”. This does not stop them maintaining that greater use of phonics and better teacher training is the answer to English literacy problems.

Teachers have to work much harder too

2010-02-08T08:40:00.000-08:00

English spelling inconsistencies don’t merely make learning to read and write more difficult than most other languages. Teaching those skills is harder too.

One major way in which irregular spellings make the lives of teachers more difficult is by causing them to do much more marking. Nearly all pupils need to have the minimum of 3700 common words with some unpredictable letters (keep, leap, people) corrected several times before they can spell them correctly most of the time. Identically sounding words which are spelt differently in different contexts (to, two, too) require even more marking, and still trip up most students occasionally throughout their school days, and for the rest of their lives.

It is not only teachers of English who have to help students to learn to spell. Spelling inconsistencies add to the work load of all teachers. Teachers of all subjects tend to feel obliged to correct spelling errors. Doing so is often school policy. Spelling uncertainties regularly disrupt the concentration of students when writing essays or answering questions. The spelling mistakes they commit do the same for teachers. Having to keep stopping to correct spelling errors makes it harder to concentrate on what students have written, in English as much as in other subjects.

I hesitate to call the correction of spelling mistakes ‘a waste of time’. For as long as current spelling conventions remain the accepted norm, schools have to teach them. Parents and employers expect them to do so. What is utterly beyond doubt however is that the vast majority of English spelling errors are caused by English spelling irregularities: bed, fed, led – said, head; end, bend, lend – friend; fun, run, sun – one, son, and so on for nearly 4000 words.

Apart from causing spelling errors and adding to teachers’ marking loads, English spelling inconsistencies also make teaching children to read and write less rewarding. In most other subjects, one of the great joys of teaching is to help children understand something – seeing a light switch on in a child’s brains. Having to force them to learn facts which make no logical sense is more difficult, more frustrating and less rewarding, for pupils and teachers alike. It constantly offers opportunities for failure rather than success.

There is nothing to understand about spelling differences, such as ‘leave, sleeve’ and ‘believe’. All that teachers can do is help pupils to cram them into their heads, as best they can. Other subjects involve some rote-learning too, but not so consistently. For most of them children can use some reasoning to access them when stuck. It is possible to work out that 7 x 7 makes 49. There is no logical explanation for the different spellings of ‘me, see, key’. They are simply the spelling errors or whims of early printers which have become enshrined in dictionaries and keep being copied.

Learning historical dates or geographical data has some benefits. It helps to give children a better understanding of our past and to form a clearer mental picture of our earth. Having to memorise the thousands of random English spellings is merely a matter of learning to conform to unreasonable conventions.

English spelling irregularities also make both initial English literacy learning and teaching much duller than in other languages. To save children from overwhelming confusion and to prevent too many losing interest in learning as soon as they enter school, they are initially shielded from phonic inconsistencies, such as ‘an – any, go – do, our – your’. They are first taught with just phonically reliable spellings. It is however quite impossible to write exciting or stimulating stories and avoid using all the most common irregularly spelt English words. The specially constructed texts with which English beginning readers are taught are therefore invariably rather dull.

In other European languages, teachers can choose any stories or poems that they find appealing. Any collection of words and sentences can be used to teach children the sounds of their letters, because they are all regular. There is no need to go to great lengths to insulate beginners from phonic inconsistencies, such as ‘here – there –were’ or ‘home – come’.

Catching up is hard to do

2010-02-04T02:33:00.000-08:00

Even children of average ability or better take longer to learn to read and write English than their contemporaries in other languages, as I explained three postings ago. Learning the sounds for 185 different spellings inevitably takes longer than doing so for a mere 50. The 2000 common words in which some letters have irregular sounds (‘many, pretty, once’ instead of ‘man, pet, on’) make the process even slower. Learning to write with several thousand unpredictable spellings, such as ‘air, care, bear, there, their’, prolongs English literacy learning still further. Even good spellers need at least 10 years for that.

The most common way of learning to read English is to begin with learning the main sound for 25 of the 26 letters of the English alphabet in simple words like ‘cat, sat, mat’, followed by the most common combinations of them, such as ‘ch’, ‘sh’ and ‘qu’ (chip, ship, quick). After roughly six months to a year of learning to decode and to write words and simple sentences in which graphemes have their primary sound only, children gradually begin to be introduced to some of the most common words in which some letters don’t obey the main patterns, such as ‘one, two, four’. This is generally done in carefully controlled, small doses.

For bright children and those of at least average ability, who also receive adequate help at home, this carefully structured process of basic literacy learning is effective and not too traumatic. Anyone who fails to keep up, however, is immediately faced with a bigger learning burden and less time to tackle it.

In other languages, fewer pupils fall behind their contemporaries in learning to read and write, because there is so much less to learn. Catching up is much easier too. In English, both initial learning and assisting those who struggle once their difficulties become apparent, is much more challenging. For functionally illiterate adults, making up for lost time is especially hard, as the meagre success of most initiatives to improve inadequate adult literacy skills have proved.

This has particularly serious disadvantages for the rehabilitation of offenders. Poor literacy skills undoubtedly help to land many of them in jail in the first place. They also handicap efforts to prevent their re-offending. To what extent criminality is a direct result of illiteracy may be hard to calculate precisely, but government statistics tell us that far more prisoners have literacy problems than the 20% level of English-speaking people generally. According to a recent report by the Scottish prison service, 50% of prisoners are functionally illiterate: http://news.stv.tv/scotland/150989-fifty-per-cent-of-male-scots-prisoners-are-illiterate/

Education is one of the proven best ways to prevent re-offending, but this is difficult for inmates who still have profound difficulties with reading and writing. This may help to explain why Britain and the US both have exceptionally high incarceration and re-offending rates. The free time which prison affords helps many offenders to develop a taste for learning, but if they still have severe literacy problems, they can only make limited use of it. Consequently many functionally illiterate young offenders make little or no progress with learning. Most of them go in and out of jail for relatively brief spells which are too short to make substantial improvements to their literacy levels.

In countries where the literacy rates of prisoners are better, improving their education while behind bars is much easier. They can immediately be helped to embark on courses that improve their employment prospects. The poor literacy skills of many English-speaking offenders make this more difficult and they are more likely to return to prison repeatedly, at a very high social and economic cost.

English spelling is worst for the weakest

2010-01-27T03:45:00.000-08:00

As I explained in my last post, roughly 20% of all speakers of English have such serious literacy problems that they never learn to read well, let alone write. Another 20% do marginally better, but don’t enjoy reading, find many texts beyond their comprehension and struggle with writing.

In the UK, only 63% of 16-year-olds gained a C grade or better in the 2009 GCSE English examinations. Achieving a C grade is regarded as having attained an acceptable level of competence in a subject for further study. Many of 27% of pupils who manage to scrape a C, had to work very hard for it. Schools also put much effort into ensuring that anyone with the potential to get a C does not end up with a D, because their standing in school league tables depends on the number of pupils achieving A-C grades, and especially in English and maths.

As an English teacher, I found that only those who managed an A or B grade were really good at English. Among the weakest C-graders there were many who regularly misread texts and had serious spelling problems. We can safely conclude from the English examination results that at least 40% of school leavers have serious literacy problems, and that quite a few more struggle too.

Unfortunately, nobody can learn much without learning at least to read first, and poor writing skills impede progress too. Because of its inconsistencies, the English spelling system delays access to other learning for much longer, and to more pupils, than more learner-friendly writing systems do.

Even bright children don’t benefit from having to spend more time on literacy acquisition than their counterparts in other countries. But the children who take a very long time to read and write, are far more seriously disadvantaged. They tend to need more time for all subjects, but their prolonged struggle with literacy leaves them particularly short of it. The educational prospects of the 20% who never really get to grips with it are worse still.

Apart from reducing the time and energy available for other learning, a prolonged struggle with learning to read and write also has the potential to turn more pupils into reluctant learners soon after they start school. Falling behind and being taken out of lessons for extra help is not a confidence booster. Nor is inability to cope with most of the work tackled by your classmates, because of reading difficulties.

Governments in all English-speaking countries have been increasing educational spending since the 1980’s to reduce educational failure. But a spelling system that guarantees literacy failure for 1 in 5 pupils inevitably entails a considerable level of general educational failure too. In 2009, for example, 33% of school leavers in England did not gain a C grade in any subject. A third of 16-year-olds ended up with very little to show for their 11 years in education. The US has a similar percentage of students dropping out of high school.

Even very regular spelling systems don’t enable all children to attain equally high educational standards. But orthographies that make at least learning to read easier than English enable more children of quite low ability to become at least moderately well educated too. They enable more pupils to get onto the ladder to educational success, and much faster.

Improvements to English spelling would therefore help the weakest pupils most of all, just as increasing the personal tax allowance makes the biggest difference to the lowest earners. It gives them substantially more access to basic necessities, while making a less noticeable difference to those on average or higher incomes. Spelling systems which are more learner-friendly leave fewer people educationally out in the cold, unemployable after school or unfit for further learning, while benefiting all other learners a little too, albeit less strongly.

The 20% barrier

2010-01-19T02:31:00.000-08:00

Establishing exactly how much literacy failure the inconsistencies of English spelling produce is difficult. This would require an identical survey to be conducted in all English-speaking countries at the same time and to matched groups of people.

Nevertheless, there is plenty of evidence that poor literacy is a major concern of their governments. Over the past couple of decades they have all increased their spending on literacy teaching in primary schools and on remediation of adult literacy problems. In the US the NCLB (No Child Left Behind) initiative was introduced to drive up standards. In the UK, the Literacy Strategy launched in 1998 and the more recent ECAR (Every Child A Reader) had a similar aim.

They have also paid for many literacy surveys and studies into literacy problems and how to reduce them for at least a century. The never-ending disputes among teachers, academics and government advisors about how best to teach children to read and write and at what age formal literacy teaching should begin also suggest that English literacy acquisition is problematic.

A government-commissioned survey by Sir Claus Moser into adult basic skills in England in 1999 found that around 7 million adults (22 %) had a literacy level which was inadequate for everyday reading needs. An earlier US survey had also found that roughly 1 in 5 adults have literacy standards which leave them functionally illiterate.

School tests give a similar picture. The SATs (Standard Assessment Test) results of 11-year-olds in England since 1997 also suggest that around 20% of children cannot manage to become competent readers and writers by that age. The tests were introduced to ascertain how many children acquire literacy skills which are adequate for secondary education before they leave primary school. By labelling schools in which a high proportion of children did not manage to achieve this as ‘failing’, they were also aimed at driving up standards.

They were first introduced by the Conservatives in the early 1990s but substantially modified after Labour came to power in 1997. Their new tests were first used in 1998 and found that only 64% of 11-year-olds were achieving an adequate standard in English (Level 4). By the following year this had jumped to 71% and by 2000 to 75%.

Labour immediately claimed this as evidence of having transformed literacy standards in English primary schools by the introduction of its Literacy Strategy in 1998. It does however seem far more likely that the spectacular rises in the percentages of pupils achieving Level 4 between 1998 and 2000 (from 64% to 75%) were due mainly to the introduction of new tests and teachers learning to teach to them, rather than the new Literacy Strategy.

The SATs are taken by 11-year-olds. The new teaching method imposed on schools in 1998 was initially implemented just with 5-year-olds. An additional year group was subject to the new guidelines each year thereafter. It not did impact on the teaching of 10-year-olds until 2003. It could not have any effect on their results in 1999 or 2000. Moreover, the 2003 cohort performed exactly as that of 2000, with still only 75% achieving Level 4 in English.

Nor have there been any dramatic improvements in literacy standards since. Just modest 1 per cent gains for a few years, followed by regression. The results now stand at 80%. It seems that, with the current spelling system, breaking that 20% barrier of functional illiteracy is just not possible, no matter how much money is spent and how much schools get vilified for failing to achieve what governments would like.

English literacy progress is slower and harder

2010-01-13T01:45:00.000-08:00

I am now going to point out some of the consequences which result from the heavier English literacy learning burdens.

Learning the sounds for the 185 English graphemes inevitably takes longer than learning to sound out just 50, which is the average number of spellings used by other Europeans languages. The 2000 words in which some letters don’t have their more common sound (women, womb, wombat – won, wonder) prolong the time needed for learning to read English even more.

It is therefore not surprising that a cross-European team led by Professor Philip Seymour from Dundee university which investigated literacy acquisition rates in 13 languages concluded in 2003 (British Journal of Psychology):
“Children from a majority of European countries become accurate and fluent in foundation level reading before the end of the first school year. ....The rate of development in English is more than twice as slow.”

Establishing exactly how much more time English-speaking children take for learning to read is difficult, because there are great differences between individual pupils, and teaching quality makes a difference too. But we are unlikely to be far off the mark by guessing that a spelling system which uses three times more graphemes than others, is going to make the learning of basic letter-to-sound correspondences considerably slower. The 69 graphemes with variable sounds (ear heard heart) retard progress still further.

Perhaps the task which beginning readers of English have to tackle can be more easily understood by contemplating learning a foreign language. The prospect of learning to sound out 185 spellings would be much more daunting than doing so for a mere 50. Having to cope with many additional words in which those graphemes have unpredictable sounds, would make the task even more challenging.

I wonder if the literacy difficulties in their own language deter many speakers of English from learning other languages. As a foreign language teacher, I found many of my pupils pleasantly surprised by the ease with which they could learn to read other languages. Even Russian, in which many English letters have different sounds (such as p = r, m = t, y = long oo) caused them no difficulties after a few months – because in Russian the sounds of those letters are completely reliable.

The other predictable consequence of any difficult-to-master system is a higher failure rate. Not many people could learn to use computers with the old DOS operating system, but the invention of windows quickly put computing within the grasp of millions. There is every reason to speculate that improvements to English spelling would similarly put literacy acquisition within the reach of many of those who are currently debared from it by the difficulties of coping with the irregularities of English spelling.

Among those who learn to play the piano, violin or tennis, or practise to become a good runner, footballer or artist, the proportions of successful, average and failed achievers is much the same as with English literacy. Skills that require a special aptitude are completely mastered by only few. With perseverance, many can learn to be quite good at them too, but a substantial numbers never get beyond the basics, no matter how hard they try. The difficulties posed by the inconsistency of English spelling have a similar effect and prevent millions from ever becoming competent readers or spellers.

Sadly, inability to cope with learning to read and write has a far more devastating effect on people’s lives than lack of musical, artistic or sporting talent. Making literacy more easily, and thereby more widely accessible would therefore bring enormous benefits.

The whole weight of the English literacy learning burdens

2010-01-06T04:09:00.000-08:00

My Dec 2009 blogs show the 228 different ways in which 80 of the 91 basic English spelling rules get broken and also the 69 spellings which can have different pronunciations. For some children, even just learning those lists is a big challenge, but they give only a glimpse of the total English literacy learning burden.

I have established that by age 16 schoolchildren meet at least 3695 relatively common words which contain one or more unpredictable letters (such as ‘blue shoe flew through too’ or ‘leave sleeve even’ and ‘believe’), and that over half of those words also have not entirely decodable pronunciations (such as ‘any, able, father’). - All the words with potential to cause reading difficulties are listed on the Sight Words page at www.englishspellingproblems.co.uk . The words with unpredictable spellings are shown on the other pages.

For learning to read and write English, children must not only learn to decode more spellings for reading and internalise more spelling rules for writing, they also have to memorise unpredictable spelling quirks and idiosyncrasies for far more words than in any other alphabetic language.

While other European languages use an average of 50 spellings, English-speaking children have to learn to sound out and to use 185 graphemes. Finnish children don’t need to learn any unpredictable spellings in addition to their 38 letter-to-sound correspondences, and no other Europeans have to memorise irregularities for more than a few hundred words, whilst English-speaking children have to tackle nearly 4000 unpredictable spellings in the course of their ordinary schooling.

All this is in addition to the much greater reading difficulties posed by the 69 spellings with variable sounds (sound soup shoulder) which no other European child experiences. The 2000 common words which contain letters that can have different sounds make English reading as well as spelling progress much slower and harder.

After spending a few weeks learning the sounds for their 50 or so graphemes, other European children can go on to improve their reading ability without much further help from adults. When stuck, they can simply refer to their reliable one-page letter-to-sound correspondence chart, consisting of a few dozen simple words with illustrations.

They don’t need to spend years progressing from simple, especially constructed texts which use only words with the main letter sounds (a fat cat sat; keep sleep deep) to normal stories which include horrors like ‘plough through’, as English-speaking children do. Once they have learned to read a few hundred words, they can decipher all other words.

In English, at least 2000 words keep tripping children up for a long time (said, beautiful, woman...). Unless they are regularly listened to by an adult who gently helps them and who encourages them to keep going for several years, it is easy to give up on learning to read English as simply too difficult.

I hope I have managed to give at least some idea why English literacy acquisition is much harder and slower than in all other alphabetic languages.

Reading problems

2009-12-09T03:51:00.000-08:00

Although 80 of the 91 basic English spelling rules get broken in at least the 228 different ways, as shown in the post Rules and exceptions of English spelling, the total number of English graphemes (letters or letter strings used for a sound) is only 185.

This is because 69 graphemes are used for
spelling more than one sound
as can be seen below.
They create reading difficulties.

And – apron, any, father
came – camera
wait – plait, said
always – algebra
tall - shall
care - are
autumn - laugh, mauve
to deliberate - a deliberate act
stays - says

success - soccer
centre - Celtic
chop –chorus, choir, chute
acquire - lacquer

end – English
he - the
mean - meant, break
ear – early, heart, bear
tree - matinee
even – seven, fete
veil - ceiling, eider, leisure
weight - height

their - weir
people - leopard, leotard
here – there, were
tablet - chalet
beauty – beau
few - sew
they - key

get - gem
girl - ginger
gym – gynaecologist

house - hour

ink – kind
define –engine, machine
field - friend, sieve
limb – climb
signal - sign

amnesia - mnemonic

lost - post
go - do
road - broad
bone – done, gone
toes – does, shoes
roll - doll
tombola - bomb, comb, tomb
boot - foot, brooch
despot - depot
sound - soup, couple
bough - rough, trough, through
bought - drought
should - shoulder
sour - four, journey
how - low

queen – bouquet

sun – sure
scent - luscious, molusc
rose - dose
possible - possession

this - thing
picture - mature

cup – push
build – fruit, ruin

was – wag
what - who
won - woman, women, womb, wombat
word – worn

box - xylophone, anxious

type - typical
daddy - apply

zip – azure.

How English spelling differs from other writing systems

2009-12-08T23:30:00.000-08:00

For native speakers of English it is not easy to appreciate how much English spelling differs from other alphabetic writing systems. Literate adults nearly all began to become acquainted with it at a very young age, on their parents’ laps, and they have generally taken quite a long time to master it. They were usually also never made deliberately aware of how much more time and effort, in comparison to other languages, English literacy acquisition takes.

To me the uniqueness of English spelling was made more obvious, because I did not begin to learn the language until the age of 14, before starting German the following year. My first languages were Lithuanian and Russian. I could not help but notice that the three others were all spelt much more consistently and could be learnt to read and write much faster. I have since spent much time investigating English spelling rules and exceptions and hope that I can now explain clearly how the English writing system differs from all other alphabetic ones.

Most languages have around 40 sounds. English has 43½ . (The half sound is any unstressed vowel, as in ‘certain, flatten, abandon’. It is never clearly audible, because only stressed English vowels can be heard properly (certain, flatten, abandon). Of those there is usually only one per word.)

All alphabetic writing systems start by obeying the basic alphabetic principle of using a grapheme (a letter like p, or a letter string like sh or ee) to spell one sound only (for example, sh - ee - p). Quite a few European languages conform to this principle entirely (Finnish) or fairly closely (Italian and Spanish). Finnish uses just 38 spellings for its 38 sounds. Other European languages have an average of 50 graphemes.

The Finnish orthography exemplifies alphabetic perfection. English spelling does the opposite. It uses 185 spellings for its 43½ sounds, and is the most irregular and hardest-to-master European writing system.

The first English spelling complication stems from 19 of its sounds being spelt with more than one grapheme. Sometimes this depends on being in the middle (sauce, late) or at the end of word (saw, lay); sometimes on the sounds which come after (c/at/ot/ut, kite/kept) or before it (pick, seek). This results in 81 basic spelling rules for the 43½ English speech sounds.

There are also 10 patterns for endings (father, ordinary, single) and prefixes (decide, indulge) and the consonant doubling rule (diner - dinner). This gives the English spelling system a total of 91 basic rules.

However, only 11 of the 91 basic English spelling rules have no exceptions
(Bed, Jug/ jog/ jab, gorge, ring, single, pin,
musician, this, thing, van, television).
The other 80 all get broken in at least one word (e.g. lips – llama), with 17 of them broken in so many different ways, and by so many words, that they cannot really be said to have any rule or pattern, as I will explain later.

The post 'Rules and exceptions of English spelling' shows the 80 basic English spelling rules which have exceptions and gives examples of all the different ways in which they get broken.

Rules and exceptions of English spelling

2009-12-08T02:57:00.000-08:00

Below are the

80 basic English spelling rules
which have exceptions,
with examples of
the 150 main and 78 less common ways in which they get broken:

Cat - plait meringue
plate - wait weight straight great vein reign tabledahlia champagne fete
play - they weigh ballet cafe matinee
air - care bear aerial their there questionnaire
car – are, heart + (Southern Engl. bath)
sauce - caught bought always tall crawl
saw - (UK also: or, four, more)
C/at/ot/ut - character, kangaroo, queue
crab/ clap - chrome
lilac - stomach, anorakneck - cheque
Chat - picture
clutch - much

Dad - blonde

End - head any said Wednesday friend leisure leopard bury
her - turn bird learn word journey
Eel - eat even ceiling field police people me key ski debris quay
jolly - trolley movie corgi

Fish - photo stuff rough
Garden - ghastly guard
House – who

Ink - mystery pretty sieve women busy build
bite - might style mild kind eider height climb island indict sign
my - high pie rye buy I eye

Jelly, jig – gentle, ginger
fidget - digit

Kite/ kept - chemistry
seek - unique
risk - disc mosque

Lips - llama
Mum - dumb autumn
Nose - knot gone gnome mnemonic

On - cough sausage
want – wont
quarrel - quod
mole - bowl roll soul old mould boast most goes mauve
toe - go dough sew cocoa pharaoh oh depot

Oil - oyster
toy - buoy

food - rude shrewd move group fruit truth tomb manoeuvre
blue do shoe through
good - would put woman courier

Order – board court
wart, quart – worn quorn
more - soar door four war swore abhor

Out - town
now - plough

Quick - acquire choir
Rug - rhubarb write

Sun - centre scene
face - case
fancy - fantasy

Shop - chute sure moustache liquorice
ignition - mission pension suspicion fashion
ambitious - delicious luscious
facial - spatial

Tap, pet - pterodactyl two debt
delicate - democrat

Up - front some couple blood
cute - you newt neutral suit beauty Tuesday nuclear
cue - few view menu

have - spiv
river - chivvy

Window - which
fix - accept except exhibit
Yak - use

Zip - xylophone
rose - froze

measure - azure

Endings and prefixes:
loveable - credible
vertical - novel anvil petrol
ordinary - machinery inventory century carpentry
fasten - abandon truncheon orphan goblin certain
absence - balance
absent - pleasant
father - author armour nectar centre injure quota
decide - divide
indulge - endure

Consonant doubling:
merry – very - serrated
(regular – missing - surplus)
372 - 384 – 158)

The words above give just one example of the different ways in which the main English spelling patterns are disobeyed. Between them, they create a list of 3700 words which have some tricky letters that need to be individually memorised. These are all listed in the blog
http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com/2010/11/english-spelling-rules.html
and also on my website http://www.englishspellingproblems.co.uk/

Introduction

2009-11-23T03:38:00.000-08:00

I see English spelling as a tool which has become very blunt and hard to use since Chaucer first created it around 1360. The History page on my website http://www.englishspellingproblems.co.uk/ has a brief explanation of who and what made it so irregular during the intervening six centuries.

On this blog, I will try to explain how English spelling inconsistencies affect children’s progress with learning to read and write, as well as the teaching difficulties they create and the costs which they incur. Eventually I also intend to make some suggestions for improving it.

Because I am well aware that the mere mention of spelling reform outrages many people even more than a red rag a bull, I won’t be putting forward any ideas for spelling change for a very long time. Possibly never, because I cannot envisage spelling reform as a realistic possibility until it is generally understood, right across the English-speaking world, why English spelling needs improving. So I will wait and see what reactions this blog produces before deciding if any details of a possible English spelling reform are worth discussing.

If u are already well aware of the problems which English spelling creates, u may find it hard to believe that many people claim not see that an irregular spelling system, such as the English one, makes learning to read and write much harder than more consistent ones. Perhaps they have simply never stopped to think about it?

Is it really not blindingly obvious that learning to spell words, such as those with the /ee/ sound for example, for which the spellings have to be memorised one by one (see, seat, seize, siege, precede), has to take longer than when u can simply learn just one spelling per sound?

Is it not equally clear that learning to read is much slower when identical spellings can have different sounds (great treat threat; seize seismic; siege sieve; precede precedent) than if they are allowed to have just a single one (keep sleep deep)?

It is well-known that Finland and Korea always come top in all international comparisons of educational performance. What few people are aware of is that those two countries have the world’s two best alphabetic writing systems.

I will next try to explain how English spelling differs not just from the best but all other alphabetic ones. If u want to know straight away, u can read my book ‘Understanding English Spelling’. I hope to do it all a bit more succinctly on here, but it will still take a while.