Whether you’ve spoken English your entire life or began learning it as an adult, chances are you’ve been frustrated with English spelling at some point, which often seems to be more exceptions than rules! But why is this the case?
The short answer: English is like a painting, where the spelling conventions weren’t established all at once, but added on in layers. If we look at these layers one by one, we’ll see that English spelling follows a variety of different patterns that made sense for the way words were spoken at a particular point in time or for the languages that English borrowed from. Today, these different patterns are just mixed up together to create a beautiful (if at times frustrating) work of art!
An overview of English
In very general terms, English can be divided into three distinct eras, during which the language changed dramatically. This included its spelling, but also its grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. These three eras are:
- Old English: The earliest version of English that developed from the languages of Germanic tribes who invaded the island of Britain in the 5th century.
- Middle English: The version of English that developed after the Normans invaded England in 1066, bringing an early version of the French language with them.
- Modern English: The version of English that developed from around the 15th century on, which was heavily influenced by colonization and advances in technology.
Let’s take a deeper look at how events in each of these periods shaped English spelling!
Old English spelling
Originally, English wasn’t written with the letters we use today, but with a different alphabet known as runes. (Runes look unfamiliar to most of us today—although you might recognize one, ᛒ, as the inspiration for the Bluetooth logo!)
Where did our modern letters come from, then? Today, English uses the Latin alphabet. The Roman Empire began invading Britain in 43 BCE, but it was most likely Christian missionaries from Ireland who adopted their alphabet first and then began using it to write English. At first, these missionaries kept some rune-like letters to represent sounds in English that Latin didn’t use: One example is the symbol þ, called thorn, which came from the rune ᚦ and was used for one of the sounds that we now represent as “th.” Religious scribes would write words as they sounded, so there was a lot of variability in how Old English was spelled. On the upside, however, there were no silent letters at this stage in the language!
When French-speaking Normans invaded Britain, they changed English in lots of ways. French became the language of the upper class in Britain, introducing thousands of new words into English that we still use today! Even though English is classified as a Germanic language—meaning some of its closest relatives are German, Dutch, and Swedish—the extensive French vocabulary that was introduced into English during this period is one of the reasons that many people confuse English for a Romance language.
For example, the reason English has different words for animals (like cows, chickens, and pigs) and the meat that comes from them (beef, poultry, and pork) is because the farmers who raised the animals spoke English, while the upper classes who sat back and enjoyed having dinner served to them used French names for what they were eating! You can easily see the similarities between English beef, poultry, and pork and the French counterparts they were borrowed from: bœuf, poulet, and porc.
This also meant that the educated scribes who ended up writing English during this time period based a lot of their conventions on French spelling. These scribes were the ones who replaced runes with the Latin letters we know today. They also came up with patterns that made sense to them for capturing the pronunciation of English vowels—Old English often did not differentiate between long and short vowels (like “ee” and “e”) in writing, but Middle English scribes began doubling the vowel to show that it made a long sound, as in words like see.
Middle English spelling
While many conventions of writing English started to become fixed during the Middle English period, the same can’t be *said* for the spoken language (pun intended 😉). One of the biggest reasons English spelling looks so confusing now is because language and pronunciation keeps changing even after scribes or authorities decide on the “correct” spelling.
One of the biggest changes in English pronunciation was the Great Vowel Shift that took place over the 15th-18th centuries. During this period, the pronunciation of English vowels changed, but the way they were written down typically didn’t (and still hasn’t!). This means that a lot of the spellings we now see in English represent the way it used to be pronounced before the 15th century, not the way it’s pronounced today! For instance, the word boot is written with “oo” rather than “uu” because it used to sound like boat, with a long “o” sound. Over time, people gradually started pronouncing the word more like how it sounds today, but no one ever bothered to change the spelling.
And it wasn’t just the vowels that changed. Take the word knight, which has as many silent letters as it does non-silent ones! That’s because the “k” sound was not silent in Old English, and the letters “gh” used to represent a sound kind of like the one at the end of the German name Bach.
Over time, many people started dropping this sound, or pronouncing it like an “f” depending on the word. So the word “knight” would have sounded something like knight in Middle English, with the German-like sound for the “ch.”
This word (and many others like it) is still written based on the way it sounded back then, but the pronunciation of the vowel changed due to the Great Vowel Shift, and the sounds that the “k” and “gh” represented became silent. It’s no wonder so many people have been confused trying to learn how to spell English words!
Modern English spelling
During the Modern English period, there was still quite a bit of variation in the way different people spelled words (even their own names—Shakespeare’s name was spelled 25 different ways in his lifetime)! This began to change after William Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476. Thanks to the printing press, the writing conventions printed in one book could be spread to a much wider audience, and this eventually led to the adoption of certain standard conventions of spelling.
The development of dictionaries also helped establish a common source of knowledge that people turned to for deciding how a word should be spelled. For example, Noah Webster believed in promoting English as it was used in America, rather than following British conventions. His dictionary was instrumental in Americans learning different ways of spelling some words, such as color rather than colour. There’s no particularly logical reason to use one of these spellings rather than the other; the fact that we use one of them just tells us whose opinion was most influential in the place where we learned English.
Aside from Webster’s dictionary, though, the availability of printed books largely led to greater standardization of how people all around the world spell English—and other languages, too! As English spread during the colonial period and came into contact with a variety of different languages around the world, it was more likely than not that people borrowing words from those languages would continue spelling them the way they were originally spelled in the Latin alphabet, not changing them to fit English conventions.
Thus, in addition to modern English words following the spelling patterns that made sense for Old and Middle English, new additions to the language also follow the conventions of other languages, such as pneumonia (Greek), cappuccino (Italian), ballet (French), tortilla (Spanish), buoy (Dutch), dachshund (German), czar (Russian), bazaar (Arabic), samurai (Japanese)… and many, many more!
Layers of learning!
English spelling represents the way English has been pronounced by a lot of different people, in a number of different parts of the world, at many very different periods in time! While this can be frustrating at times, it also provides an incredible look into the history of English. And fortunately, your pal Duo is always here to help you if you’re still learning!
To learn more about the history (and future!) of English, check out these other posts: