logo  ELT Concourse teacher training
Concourse 2

English spelling

shcool nohing excellense

"a conspiracy to undermine a country that won't tow the western line" – BBC News website 17 December 2014

"Angry Hamilton accuses Vettel of breaking rules with break testing" – Daily Mail, 01 May 2018

duel Earlier this month David Cameron, the prime minister, visited Stonehenge ... and announced plans to duel the A303
The Daily Telegraph website 21 December 2014
(Image from Wikipedia, Eugene Onegin and Vladimir Lensky's duel, Ilya Repin, 1899.)

We all make mistakes.  There are three sorts above.  Which is which?

  1. Slips and typographical errors
  2. Errors caused by the lack of sound-spelling consistency in English
  3. Errors caused by simply not knowing how a word is spelled

Right.

  1. The first two pictures (shcool and nohing) are just slips and they happen frequently.  For the purposes of this guide, we can ignore them because they have nothing to do with spelling rules in English.
  2. The third picture (excellense) is the result of someone simply not knowing how the word excellence is spelled in English.
  3. The quotations from the BBC, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph websites are errors caused by the lack of sound-spelling consistency in English.  They are called homophone errors because toe and tow, break and brake and duel and dual sound the same but are differently written and mean different things.  News sites are a rich source of such errors because many news stories are submitted by journalists over the telephone.  Another example, from the Daily Telegraph, sadly since corrected, is the description of shelves which "grown with academic tomes".

English spelling is wholly irregular and random.  Right?

Wrong.

It is often claimed that English spelling is impossible, or at least very difficult, to learn.  For example:

English spelling is probably the most irregular spelling system of all those based on the alphabetic system.  Not only can't you tell how to spell a word from hearing it spoken, you can't predict how a word is spoken from the written word either.
The English Spelling Society

In fact, that is only very partially right because there are clear connections between how a word is pronounced and its spelling despite the fact, which is not arguable, that there are numerous exceptions.

To see how intuition and the application of simple rules allows you to predict the sound of a word, try pronouncing these nonsense words.
Click here when you have tried the test.

flubber flooksendy flimmax greancumbler
drimble bentle heasering chumblegrint

To understand what follows, you need to understand that we are considering sounds not letters.
So, for example, the single letter 'p' is represented as a single sound (transcribed, i.e., written as /p/) and even a double 'p' as in pepper still only has a single sound /p/ in the middle and at the beginning.
Pairs of letters like 'sh', 'ch', 'th', 'ck', 'sc' etc. are also often only single sounds as they are in, for example:
    shave (transcribed as /ʃeɪv/ with a single symbol [/ʃ/] representing the first two letters)
    school (transcribed as /skuːl/ with a single symbol [/k/] representing 'ch')
    this (transcribed as /ðɪs/ with a single symbol [/ð/] representing the first two letters)
    sock (transcribed as /sɒk/ with a single symbol [/k/] representing the last two letters)
    science (transcribed as /ˈsaɪəns/ with a single symbol [/s/] representing the first two letters)

You do not need to be able to read the phonemic transcriptions to understand what follows (although it will help).

rules

The rules

Here's a short list of the rules:

Long and short vowels

  1. short vowels only usually require a single letter: bit, bat, sit, hat, kit, cut and so on.  This is the Consonant-Vowel-Consonant principle or CVC.  It is adhered to in thousands of words and knowing it allows us to predict from the spelling how, for example, all of the following will be pronounced.  The CVC principle also allows us to infer the spelling from the sound, even if we have never heard the word.
        combat
        habitat
        brickbat
        humdrum
        driven
    and innumerable more words.
  2. long vowels are represented in two ways:
    1. by inserting a vowel, often 'e' or 'i', after the consonant: bite, bate, site, stating, hate, kite, cute, driving and so on.  This is the Vowel-Consonant-Vowel (VCV) principle.
    2. by inserting a second vowel letter before the consonant: beat, boat, heat etc.  This is the Consonant-Vowel-Vowel-Consonant (CVVC) principle.

Applying to these two principles, along with principle a., allows us to predict how another huge range of words will be pronounced, including, for example:
    confuse
    drive
    dreaming
    skating
    defeated
    considerable
    displeasing
    contracting
    disambiguation
and thousands more.  Again, this will work in reverse: we can make a very good guess at the spellings of these words when we hear them by applying the principles.

There are exceptions (of course) and they are common words, usually.  They include:
    come, done, give, gone, have, live, love, none, one, some
All these have short vowels but end VCV.  They are quite simple to learn and learners usually have little trouble pronouncing or spelling them.

Consonant doubling

  1. consonant doubling often occurs in an effort to 'protect' the short vowel sound.
    If the consonant were not doubled in hatter, for example, the word would be pronounced as hater (because the VCV pattern would compel it) and the same goes for very many other words or word pairs such as diner-dinner, taper-tapper, cuter-cutter, fate, fatter, later-latter etc.  This is the VCCV principle.
  2. the consonant is doubled when adding an -ed or -ing ending only if the stress is on the second syllable: befit-befitting, remit-remitting but offer-offering etc.  This rule is often broken so we get, e.g., focussed and focused, targetting and targeting.
  3. regardless of stress, British English doubles the consonant if it is 'p' or 'l'.  American English does not.

Spelling the /k/ sound

The /k/ sound (as in, e.g., click, black, corn, bacon etc.) also obeys principles:

  1. single 'c' is the most common (and the way to bet) and can occur anywhere: actor, cactus, cart, because etc.
  2. doubling of the 'c' follows the same principle as any other consonant doubling: it protects the short vowel.  So we have tobacco, Mecca etc.  This is the VCCV principle, again.
  3. if the /k/ sound is followed by 'e', 'i' or 'y', 'k' is used instead of 'c': make, sketch, token, sake, slinky, skin etc.
  4. 'ck' similarly replaces 'cc' if it is followed by 'e', 'i' or 'y': panicky, tarmacked etc.
  5. 'ck' always follows a short vowel: luck, duck, back, fickle etc.  This obeys the CVC principle because, as we saw, the 'ck' combination is actually a single consonant sound (/k/).
  6. 'k' follows any other vowel or consonant: soak, coke, musk, lark etc.
  7. /kw/ is always spelled 'qu': queen, quince, equine etc.

Spelling the /dʒ/ sound (as in the 'g' in gentle)

  1. if the sound is followed by 'a', 'o' or 'u', the letter 'j' is preferred: injure, just, jangle, jumble etc.
  2. if the sound is followed by 'e', 'i' or 'y', the letter 'g' is preferred: aged, ginger, gauge, original, mangy etc.
  3. 'j' cannot be doubled (to protect a short vowel, again) so 'dg' is used instead: judged, budgerigar

v

no English words end in 'v' so we always have a following 'e': thieve, save, shave etc.

ie or ei?

Schoolchildren learn to chant I before E except after C and for hundreds of words like believe, perceive, ceiling, thieving etc., the rule works just fine.  Unfortunately, there are exceptions, as usual.

  1. Before gh, gn and ght: the spelling is ei not ie:
    weigh, neigh, foreign, feign, reign, height, freight
  2. There are numerous exceptions which include:
    beige, counterfeit, either, forfeit, heir, leisure, neither, rein, seize, their, veil, vein, weir, weird

Endings

  1. words ending in 'y'
    1. if you add an 's', the 'y' changes to 'ie': worry-worries, cry-cries etc.
    2. words ending in 'ey' usually do not change when an 's' or 'd' is added: valley-valleys, player-players-played etc.  (But lay-laid, say-said etc.)
    3. 'y' does not change when it's followed by 'i': dry-drying, cry-crying, spy-spying etc.
  2. words ending in 'e'
    1. words ending in consonant + 'e' drop the 'e' when adding anything beginning with a vowel: love-loving, response-responsible etc.  (But, in this case, the long vowel is often protected by retaining the 'e': likeable, mileage etc.)
    2. the soft 'c' (/s/) and 'g' (/dʒ/) sounds also mean that the 'e' is retained: manage-manageable, outrage-outrageous, trace-traceable etc.
  3. words ending in 'ie' change to 'y': die-dying, lie-lying
  4. words ending in 'ue' drop the 'e': argue-argument, true-truly
  5. words ending in 's', 'z', 'x', 'ch' or 'sh' take 'es': watch-watches, match-matches, fizz-fizzes, fix-fixes, bush-bushes, bus-buses etc.

(There is a little more on the spelling and pronunciation of verb endings in the guide to basic verb forms.)

So there are rules.  Rather too many of them, in fact, and the list above is nowhere near complete.

teaching

Teaching the rules

You can't of course, teach all the rules listed here at one go.  Many would say that learning English spelling rules is actually impossible, and unnecessary because people will pick up the patterns by exposure.  That's certainly arguable and it is clear that the more exposure people have to examples of the patterns, the more likely they are to absorb them.
It is, however, worth taking each of the regular patterns, one at a time, and focusing 20 minutes or so on them now and again (weekly, perhaps).
Spelling rules lend themselves to light-hearted games, races and competitions in the classroom because they have Right/Wrong answers.

microphone

Homophones

As we saw, not even the BBC is immune to the homophone trap.  Many native speakers trip up in this area.
If you'd like a list of a couple of hundred common ones, click here.
It is helpful, then, to look through the language you are presenting just to see if there are any homophone traps the authors or you have fallen into.
It is, however, not usually worth focusing on them because that can confuse as much as it enlightens.

There are, however, a set of homophones in English on which it is worth focusing.  In the following, can you detect the problem to describe in the right-hand column?  Click on the table when you have a few notes.

spelling task

history

Why is English spelling irregular?

OK, so spelling in English is tough because a) there are lots of confusing rules and b) even when you have mastered the rules, there's always an exception.  If you look back at the list above, you can probably find an exception to every single rule.
English spelling is something of a mess because of its history:

good news

English spelling: the good news

One advantage of having a rather odd spelling system is that meaning can often be inferred from spelling.  For example, in English, these three words are pronounced the same (they are homophones):

rite, write, right

But, because of the different spellings, we can easily see which are connected to the following words and if we know the base word, we can have a good stab at inferring the meaning of the others:

written, ritual, rightness, rights, writing, rites, righteous

Spelling and meaning, in English, are connected.
Reforming English spelling would mean that this handy reference would disappear and all three words would probably be spelled rite.
That, many argue, would be a loss.  English, they point out, is not meant to have a phonetic spelling system.

So, next time your students despair of being able to spell correctly, it may be worth pointing this out.

Another thing to point out to despairing learners is that native speakers also have trouble.  We often see, for example, dessicate, acommodation (or accomodation), embarass, wierd, definately and so on.
You, of course, can correct all those.

diacritics

Diacritics

The term diacritic refers to the accent marks which exist in many languages and show a difference in pronunciation (or used to).
Modern English retains the use of some accent marks on imported words, almost always those from French, but it is often a matter of personal taste.  Using role instead of rôle is common and hôtel is almost never seen, for example.  However, in other cases, words more recently or more obviously borrowed from French retain the accents: cliché, café, vis-à-vis, tête-à-tête etc.
When there is a possibility of ambiguity, the convention is to retain the accent markers, so we have résumé and resume.
Loan words from other languages usually get stripped of their diacritics, although über from German is seen alongside uber.  The words doppelganger and doppelgänger are in free variation and English usually removes the capital letter obligatory on German on all nouns.  The Turkish döner kebap is almost always spelled as doner kebab in English.

union jack usa

English (BrE) and American (AmE)

English (BrE) and American spelling (AmE) differ as everyone knows but the differences are not huge.  The number of words affected is probably fewer than 400.  (Given that the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains entries for 171,476 words in current use, and the Oxford website estimates that there are at least 250,000 distinct words in English, that represents a tiny proportion, less than 0.25%.)
In most cases, the AmE variant is simpler.
Here are the most commonly cited differences:

As a rule of thumb, Commonwealth countries tend to follow the BrE rules although Canadian use is more often influenced by AmE.

There's no test on all this but there are plenty of spelling tests to be had on line (with a good one at http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/spelling-challenge/) and two on this site.  One for B1/B2-level learners, here, and another for A1/A2-level learners here.
There is also a short lesson for learners with tests and exercises covering the essentials of this guide.

writing

Writing systems

This survey of English spelling would not be complete (as far as teaching the system is concerned) without some consideration of other people's writing systems.
There are three fundamental sorts:

  1. Alphabetic systems
    English has ostensibly an alphabetic system in which individual letters represent individual sounds (phonemes) but, as we saw above, spelling in English is not a good guide often to pronunciation and vice versa.  English may be described as having deep orthographic depth.  This means that the system is poor in relation to shallow languages such as German or Serbo-Croat in which there is a good correspondence between spelling and pronunciation.
    Most European languages and many languages which have only recently acquired a written form use an alphabetic system of writing although scripts vary from Latin (in which this is written) through Greek and Cyrillic to many other systems.  For obvious reasons, alphabetic systems are sometimes referred to as segmental systems because each word can be broken down into sound segments.
  2. Syllabic systems
    In these writing systems, each grapheme (i.e., independent symbol) represents a syllable rather than a single sound.  Examples include Arabic, the Japanese Hiragana script, Hebrew and Amharic among others.  Languages which deploy scripts like these usually have a syllabary (i.e., the total number of available syllables) which is quite limited.  English would be ill-suited to such as system as the number of possible syllables is well over 10,000 and each would require a separate grapheme to represent it.  Japanese, by contrast, makes do with around 100 syllables so the language is suited to this form of written representation.
    The Arabic script is used incidentally, for many other languages unrelated to Arabic (or only distantly so).
  3. Logographic systems
    In these systems, each word is represented by a single symbol.  The most obvious and famous examples are the Chinese languages and these are the only common surviving languages to use a logographic system.  For example, the symbol sun represents the concept of sun or day.  Egyptian hieroglyphics are another familiar form of logographic writing.  Chinese characters are extensively used in written Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.

Each type of writing system is processed by readers in a different way and there is good reason to suppose that these processing strategies will, especially in the early stages of learning, be carried over to attempts to read in English.  For example, Arabic speakers may be indifferent to vowels (as they are not represented in Arabic) and may confuse, e.g., glass with gallons.  Even speakers of languages which use a Latin script such as Spanish may have problems processing words in English because Spanish has a relatively shallow orthography.

disctation

Spelling sounds

One area of clear irregularity in English concerns the spelling of individual sounds rather than whole words.  English is not unique in this respect but it is, perhaps, an extreme example.
Many other languages, including Portuguese and Modern Greek have very weak relationships between sound and spelling.  Portuguese, for example, has only 5 vowel symbols but these can be pronounced in 17 different ways and the language's 18 consonants have 30 pronunciations.  Modern Greek has no fewer than 6 ways to spell the long 'ee' (/iː/) sound.

This makes writing unknown words down from dictation in English a very challenging and often disheartening business.  It is much easier to write down accurately what you hear in some other languages, especially those that have undergone occasional reform of the writing system to get closer to a one-to-one relationship between the sound and the spelling, such as German or Spanish.

In the in-service section of this site, some detail is provided concerning how consonant and vowel sounds are conventionally spelled in English.  For consonants, for example:

Vowel sounds are more variable so, for example:

If you would like to know more, click here to go to the in-service pronunciation index and select the guides from there.

References:
BBC News: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30492348 [accessed 17/12/2014]
Campbell, G, 1998, Concise Compendium of the World's Languages, London: Routledge
Chalker, S, 1987, Current English Grammar, London: Macmillan
Daily Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/archaeology/11303127/Stonehenge-discovery-could-rewrite-British-pre-history.html [accessed 21/12/2014]
Oxford dictionaries on line: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com [accessed 17/12/2014]
Proctor, P (Editor in Chief), 1995, Cambridge International Dictionary of English, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
The English Spelling Society: http://www.spellingsociety.org/ [accessed 17/12/2014]