“Rough,” “through,” “though,” “bough,” and “cough” are all spelled alike but don’t rhyme. I remember in school having to memorize a sentence that contained something like thirty-four exceptions to the “I before E, except after C” rule. All I remember of it today is, “On the weir in the weird heights behind the sovereign’s castle . . . .” Mark Twain allegedly joked that “fish” should be spelled G–H–O–T–I, the GH as in “enough,” the O as in “women,” and the TI as in “nation.”

There is even a poem (written by a Dutchman yet) called “The Chaos.” It runs to 247 lines and begins,

Dearest creature in Creation,

Studying English pronunciation,
 

     I will teach you in my verse

     Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
 

I will keep you, Susy, busy,

Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
 

     Tear in eye your dress you’ll tear.

     So shall I! Oh, hear my prayer,
 

Pray, console your loving poet,

Make my coat look new, dear, sew it?
 

     Just compare heart, beard and heard,

     Dies and diet, lord and word . . .

Why is English spelling so chaotic? One reason, of course, is that English has never had an official governing body such as the Académie Française (established in 1635) and the Real Academia Española (established in 1713). So English orthography has never been systematically reformed, as French and Spanish were, to make the spoken and written versions more alike and consistent.

The first real English dictionary was only published in 1604 and was not widely circulated. (Today, only a single copy is known to exist, in Oxford’s Bodleian Library.) So people at that time spelled English words pretty much any way they pleased, often based on which dialect they spoke. That’s why we are able to identify the five compositors of Shakespeare’s First Folio by their characteristic ways of spelling. Dictionaries didn’t become common until the second half of the seventeenth century (Samuel Johnson’s majestic Dictionary of the English Language was only published in 1755). It was then that English really began to settle down into a right way and a wrong way to spell, to the dismay of grade-school children and not a few adults.

As Middle English evolved into Modern English between 1400 and 1600, the pronunciation of many words changed radically because of what is known as the “great vowel shift.” What is now pronounced “bite” had been said “beet,” while “oot” became “out,” “boat” became “boot,” “mairt” became “meat,” and “matte” became “mate.” But while the sounds shifted, the spellings did not necessarily, being unfixed as they were.

Some consonants became silent in this period, but they did not drop out of the written language, which is why we have such spellings as “knight” and “knock.” Indeed, V is the only letter in the alphabet that is not silent in one English word or another. (To wit: aesthetic, crumb, indict, Wednesday, imagine, gnaw, ghost, business, marijuana, know, colonel, mnemonic, autumn, leopard, pneumonia,
lacquer, February, island, asthma, build, wrong, faux, and rendezvous.)

But there are many other reasons as well. One is that English has a lot of phonemes (the various sounds that make up a language). Depending on the particular dialect, there are about twenty-four consonant sounds and as many as twenty vowel sounds, for a total somewhere in the forties. French has only about thirty-eight phonemes and Spanish a mere twenty-five, fewer than the twenty-seven letters in its alphabet, with only five vowel sounds, one for each vowel in the alphabet. That is one reason why Spanish spelling is so regular and so easy to master. (Hawaiian, remarkably, has only eight consonant sounds and around ten vowel sounds, which is why it sounds so sing-songy and why its vowel-laden loan words, such as “luau,” “poi,” and “hula,” show up so often in crossword puzzles.)

Many languages use diacritics—such as accent marks, the French cedilla, the Spanish tilde, and the German umlaut—to indicate which way a particular letter is to be pronounced. But English speakers, for whatever reason, just don’t like diacritics, and so they only show up in words recently borrowed from another language. That’s why the French “café,” a place where coffee is served, has now usually lost its acute accent but retains its two-syllable pronunciation.

And English is a highly imperialistic language that has borrowed words from a vast number of other languages (many of which, of course, have returned the compliment: “OK” is understood around the world today, and the Japanese word for gay bar is, well, “gayba”). We took “igloo” from Eskimo, “yo-yo” from Tagalog, “jungle” from Hindi, “sofa” from Arabic, and “raccoon” from Algonquian. Altogether, only about 20 percent of the modern English vocabulary can be traced back to the Old English of Beowulf and the Venerable Bede.

But, as we have seen, English speakers are orthographically conservative. When we borrow a word, such as “llama,” the pronunciation soon becomes typically English but the spelling doesn’t change, in this case retaining the Spanish LL, until recently considered a separate letter of the Spanish alphabet, but not the LL sound. In some other words we drop the foreign phonemes but keep the foreign spelling. That’s why words borrowed, or constructed, from Greek spell the F sound with PH, such as “photography” and “philosophy.” Why is it “capital city” but “Capitol building”? Again, etymology. “Capital” comes from the Latin word for head, capita, while “Capitol” comes from Capitolinus, the hill in Rome where the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was located. In many languages, such as Spanish, borrowed words are spelled as if they were native ones. So the English “cocktail,” borrowed in the 1920s, was immediately respelled coctel, and photography is spelled fotografia.

Finally, scholars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries introduced what are known as “inkhorn terms,” borrowed from Greek and Latin, to dress up what they regarded as a rather low-class language. So while English already had a number of terms meaning to have inadequate economic resources, such as “poor,” “needy,” and “penniless,” all of which go back to Middle English, scholars brought in “impecunious,” from Latin. (As typesetters were then paid by the line, they naturally tended to favor such long words.)

But scholars also tried to change the English spelling of words already borrowed from Latin. The word “debt,” for instance, had been borrowed from Old French, “dette,” and spelled “det.” But because that word had come ultimately from the Vulgate Latin word “debitum,” they stuck a silent B into the word, where it remains to this day. The same thing happened to “dout,” which became “doubt,” to link it to Latin “dubitare.”

Shakespeare has fun with this pedantry in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The schoolmaster in the play, Holofernes, insists that pronunciation should follow the spelling, not the other way around. And so the B in “doubt” should be pronounced, despite the difficulty of doing so.

Scholars also tried to affect English syntax, with less success. The first Poet Laureate, John Dryden (1631–1700), issued a dictum forbidding the ending of a sentence with a preposition because that is one of the few word-order rules in Latin. English, which is not descended from Latin and which has very strict word-order rules, however, does end sentences with prepositions. Winston Churchill is supposed to have stetted a copyeditor’s correction to avoid a final preposition, writing in the margin, “This is the sort of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.”

Is there anything to be done about English spelling? Well, people have been complaining about it at least since the mid-sixteenth century. John Hart, an educator and grammarian (and later Chester Herald of Arms in Ordinary), left an unpublished manuscript, written in 1551, entitled The Opening of the Unreasonable Writing of Our Inglish Toung. He later published a proposed thorough reform of English spelling entitled An Orthographie. It called for adding six new letters to the alphabet and the use of many diacritics. Like all such fundamental overhauls of English spelling, it was ignored.

James Howell, the writer and grammarian (his Proverbs contains the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”), advocated a much more modest reformation of English spelling in 1662, proposing such reforms as spelling “logique,” borrowed from the French, as “logic,” and “toune” as “town.” Many of these were quickly adopted.

In the early nineteenth century, the American lexicographer Noah Webster pushed for spelling reforms such as “color” instead of “colour,” “theater” instead of “theatre,” and “music” instead of “musick.” Most of these were adopted in this country but often not in Britain and the empire.

Spelling-reform associations were formed in both Britain and the United States in the 1870s, but their proposed reforms, like all systematic ones, died aborning. In the late-nineteenth century, the Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill started using new spellings for some words in the newspaper. And between 1934 and 1975, the paper used eighty respelled words, such as, “burocrat,” “frate,” “harth,” “herse,” and “iland.” But they didn’t catch on with the public and were phased out in favor of standard spelling.

George Bernard Shaw left a considerable portion of his large estate to Britain’s Simplified Spelling Society to promote what was called, after his death, the “Shavian Alphabet” of forty-eight characters. It would have replaced the Latin one used in English for more than a thousand years. Again, it went nowhere.

The major problem with all fundamental spelling reforms is what economists call an installed-base problem. People learned the arbitrary and often illogical spelling system (if, indeed, “system” is the right word) of English in school. And they have little or no interest in learning a whole new one, however logical it might be. And publishers have no interest in adopting a new system unless their readers demand it, which they don’t.

The French and Spanish academies were able to make their spelling reforms in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries stick because literacy was very low at that time. Literacy in the English-speaking world today, however, borders 100 percent, making the opposition to major spelling reform much greater.

So it is highly unlikely that anything will change. And, thanks to a new technology that Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw never dreamed of, there is less and less need to.

The technology is called “spell-check.”