Spelling

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Introduction - why this section has so little content

Proper spelling is dull but crucial, like teeth or plumbing, noticeable only when there’s something wrong. Unfortunately for all of us, English has a frequently odd spelling system – through, though, tough, cough, bough, borough, brought, and so on and on. With other languages, once you learn which letters make which sounds, you can have a good bash at spelling and pronouncing any word. Not with English. Our quirky spelling system is a genuine obstacle on any English speaker’s journey to full literacy.

Of course, with anything written on a screen, there are now machines to help. So instead of endless pages of hard-to-spell words, I’m offering the general advice to pay attention to any squiggly underlines if they seem to be indicating a snarl-up in the spelling. Having said that, I find I often have to ignore the little squiggly lines from my Microsoft spelling-checker, which, for example, is adamant that I keep on misspelling “manikins”.

As for the programs and apps you can buy, many seem to be targeted at people who don’t speak English as their first language, and to be written by fellow non-native speakers. They ask for money but many seem to have only comic value. There's sentencechecker.top, for example, with its advice on “comas”, or grammarchecker.io, with its pitch, “Try free it now”. Presumably the software can only improve, but if the grammar-checkers remain as traditionally minded and inexpert as they have been, the only gain will be the more efficient delivery of terrible advice.

And lots of things can evade a computer’s spellcheck – if I wrote something as glaringly wrong as “through” for the past tense of “throw”, my high-street software wood not pick that up nor doze it register even the errors hear. And none of the programs I’ve come across seem programmed to pick up most of the non-standard “mistakes” which have become middle-class passwords. So although I’ve used the spell-check programs as a reason not to get myself involved in the usual spelling rules, those programs can’t be relied on and old-school spelling know-how is still important.

Personally, I think that reading is the only way to do it – general assimilation, helped by alertness to how words are spelled. I speak as a great lover of spelling and, though I say it myself, an expert practitioner – I can cite several startling performances at spelling competitions in early primary school, plus eight adult years editing as a journalist.

Editing other people’s copy in those pre-spellcheck days taught me a very valuable lesson – very few people are good at spelling. Famous reporters, eminent professors, prize-winning novelists, they could all mess up a “millennium” or an “accommodation” or even a “their / there”. Traditional “grammar” chaps can get pucely upset about misspelled words and I can see why, because a “recieve” or a “seperately” can make me wince too – but I think that’s got to be their and my problem to deal with. Let’s all bear in mind that Shakespeare wrote his own name three different ways, and that a good ten per cent of the population is dyslexic, and that the English spelling system can be barking mad . . . So let’s all calm down and be nice to each other about our sometimes not entirely accurate orthography.

If in doubt, look it up. The principal dictionaries are the Oxford English Dictionary in the UK and Merriam-Webster in the US.

Top misspelled words that may well not be picked up by a spell-check program:

it’s / its

there / their / + they’re

your / you’re

who’s / whose 

of / off ( + of / have – as in “could of done”, “might of been”)

to / too

The main differences between American and British spelling systems:

UK	US
-our	-or	(splendour neighbour humour)
-ise	-ize	(recognise organise theorise)
-yse	-yze	(analyse paralyse)
-re	-er	(centre metre theatre)
-ae, -oe	-e	(aeon diarrhoea foetal)

But those are the most general guidelines because there are so many exceptions and sub-rules to each distinction. Take the pernickety (UK) / persnickety (US) case of “advise” and “practise”, which in the US keep those spellings as nouns and verbs, but which in the UK have an “s” for the verbs and “c” for the nouns – “I’m now advising you to ignore my earlier advice”; “She practises because practice makes perfect”. Or “program” – the spelling of any use of the word in the US, whereas in British English every non-computerised usage is written “programme”.

Some individual differences:

UK	US
aeroplane	airplane
cheque	check
cosy	cozy
defence	defense
gaol	jail
jewellery	jewelry
kerb	curb
mum	mom
plough	plow
pyjamas	pajamas
sceptic	skeptic
yoghurt	yogurt

Most other English-speaking countries tend to follow the British conventions, though with lots of exceptions. Canadian spelling, for example, is usually British but uses an American “z” in words like “analyze” and “recognize” and has quite a few individual words with American versions, from “airplane” to “yogurt”. In Australia, the British conventions normally apply, but not always -- it’s “labour” in lower case but “Labor” for the political party, for example, and I think “program” is now the most common form of the non-computer sort.