Henry is the author of Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell Detroit News, December 1906. Roosevelt sits stunned in a boxing ring after losing his match with the ...

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 ...

“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 ...

My 11-year-old student sighs. How can the same letters make so many different sounds? We are looking at the letter combination “ough”, which can be read in seven different ways: “through”, “thorough”, ...

Noah Webster eliminated many inconsistencies in English spellings in his first dictionary and in blue-backed spelling books published for American classrooms. Fortunately for the survival of spelling ...

Kate Burridge does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...

This May, students from across the United States will gather in Washington D.C., for the 100th anniversary of the Scripps Spelling Bee, determined to conquer a spelling system that has baffled us for ...