English spelling is not broken so much as visibly injured. A video by Airlearn Language Show explains how the printing press, the Great Vowel Shift, dead gods, French-Italian beef, Dutch typesetters, ...

Take a look at the following English words: butcher, squirrel, mortgage, and choir. Does something seem off about them? At one point in time, the words move and love rhymed. So did blood, good, and ...

If you're a kid learning how to write, or an adult speaker of a language with sensible spelling, English spelling can seem like a cruel prank. And even if you're a completely literate adult native ...

English spelling is crazy. Even people born and raised in English-speaking societies who speak no other language still often have a lot of trouble with English spelling. You may think that English is ...

The English language is notorious for complex spelling rules—and the many words that break them. We all know i comes before e, except, of course, in certain weird words like, well, weird. We pronounce ...

“But here’s the thing,” wrote David Shariatmadari in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago. “English orthography makes no sense.” No sense? I know it is exaggeration for the sake of humor (no quibble ...

English, whatever its merits as a language, is a bitch to spell. There are so many rules, and so many exceptions, and yet in the end you have to learn a lot of words on a case-by-case basis. If future ...

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 ...

Trying to change the spelling of complex words in English won’t improve literacy rates. Wendy/Flickr, CC BY-SA My 11-year-old student sighs. How can the same letters make so many different sounds? We ...

If you're a kid learning how to write, or an adult speaker of a language with sensible spelling, English spelling can seem like a cruel prank. And even if you're a completely literate adult native ...