FAQs

The questions and answers are grouped into these categories:

1. Spelling shouldn’t be reformed because …
2. Spelling can’t be reformed because …
3. Spelling should be reformed because …
4. Spelling can be reformed because …
5. Miscellaneous questions

Apart from the last one, you will notice that these are not questions at all. They are statements. This is because the most common response to any suggestion that English spelling might be in need of reform is an assertion that English spelling shouldn’t or can’t be reformed, for some reason. The same objections come up again and again, each time in the belief that this time they somehow deliver a death-blow to the notion of spelling reform. This pamphlet is a typical example. But the Society has heard them all before, and the answers are here.

Spelling reform is the aim of this Society. We are of the opinion that English spelling can and should be reformed, and the third and fourth categories start from this position.

The fifth and final category is for any questions that don’t fit into the previous categories.

The entries in this section make the case that spelling reform is a bad idea, generally because of the consequences it would have.

The irregularity of English spelling did not prevent:

• producing one of the greatest of all literatures
• creating the Industrial Revolution with all the scientific inventions involved
• becoming the dominant language in the world today
• becoming the most widely-spoken second language in the world today

The Society should observe the rule: "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it."

It's partly true that irregular spelling did not prevent these things. But it doesn't follow that irregular spelling should not be improved. After all, slavery, disease, war and countless other evils did not prevent these things, but we still do our best to eliminate them.

Did irregular spelling perhaps help in these great achievements? No. Let's look at them in more detail:

Great literature Much of the great literature was produced at a time when spelling was more regular than it is now, and some great authors did what they could to rationalise spelling in their own times. But in any case, people who produce great literature are not the ones who are held back by irregular spelling. Who knows how many more authors we might have had?

Other languages have great literature too: it cannot be the case that irregular spelling is somehow necessary for its production.

Industrial Revolution This was driven by people for whom spelling was not an issue. No doubt there were some whose skills were more practical than theoretic, who could build machines and conduct experiments but who were not able to write their discoveries down. Unfortunately we shall never know what treasures of knowledge we have lost — and continue to lose — in this way.

Dominant language The international dominance of the English language today is undeniable. The factors behind this are complex, and beyond the scope of this website.

Irregular spelling may have played a part in the rise of the English language: but not in a way that we can be particularly proud of. Education is expensive, so an irregular spelling system helps to establish a class system and maintain a ruling elite by making it easier to identify those who have been able to afford an education. To some extent this continues today, for example when a job application is judged first by the presence or absence of spelling errors that have nothing to do with the applicant's aptitude for the job. Spelling ability is used as an indicator of social class and education. Irregular spelling may therefore inhibit social mobility and meritocracy.

For many people around the world, education is a life and death issue, and the English language is their only way out. Placing unnecessary barriers in their path can literally mean death through poverty and ignorance. That is what being a world language means.

Our children would not be able to understand what we wrote, and we would have difficulty understanding their writing, as we would effectively have different languages.  Over time some of our descendants would be cut off from some past literature completely.

No more than pre and post-decimalisation in the UK. Unless the scheme were very radical, those familiar with Traditional Spelling would probably be able to understand the new conventions quite quickly for the purposes of reading, even if it took some time to master writing in the new system. If they were unwilling or unable to do this, specially designed software could permit the rapid translation of documents written in the new system into the old, and vice versa. In a digital age, with Optical Character Recognition, and computer driven translation already a reality, changing the written word from one spelling system into another should be quite easy.

Education is all about learning difficult things. Learning to spell helps children to cope with life's problems. Until about 150 years ago, only two subjects were studied in the leading schools in England: Latin and Greek. Mastering those two languages helped to build up good habits of mind and character, which served us well for all the other subjects we needed to tackle and made them much easier to study than they would otherwise have been.

"Dumbing down" is possibly the most common objection to spelling reform. At its heart is the notion that children jolly well ought to be made to learn to spell, because we did and it did us no harm. For example:

"Listen to this. It's the President of the Spelling Society. He said, and I quote, 'people should be able to use whichever spelling they prefer.' He's the President of the Spelling Society. Well, he's wrong. And by the way, that's spelt with a 'W'." — [David Cameron, 2008]

Unfortunately the reporter did not ask Mr Cameron to explain why "wrong" should be spelt with a "W." We can only guess what he might have said:

• "You'll have to ask the Department of Education."
• "Because that's the way it's always been!"
• "You know, I have no idea. Perhaps there's something to spelling reform after all."
• "Em ..."

Dumbing down is an unusual argument. It is not claiming that some valuable aspect of written language, such as etymology, is being lost. It is claiming that difficulty of learning is itself of value, because the effort of learning gives us strength to learn other difficult subjects. This is, at the very least, an unsupported assertion.

It's also a self-contradictory argument. If it's good to study a difficult subject in order to make other subjects easier, then we can't argue that making things easier is, in general, bad. In fact it's an argument for making all learning as easy as possible.

We also have to ask why it is not possible to gain these supposed benefits by studying the difficult subjects themselves. If they are difficult, then surely they too would imbue students with good habits of mind and character; if they are not difficult, then why put off learning them.

If the aim is to teach good habits of mind and character, then is there really no better way than by memorising random data? Must we have blunt tools in Woodwork to give us the moral fibre to learn History?

The uniquely strange spelling of English is a consequence of English being made up of four languages – the original Germanic language, Latin via French, classical Latin direct, and classical Greek direct – and also bits of pieces from other languages as well. Our spelling is therefore actually interesting. Every spelling tells a story of some sort, and all this – part of our culture – should not be thrown away without the most compelling reason.

This is a much over worked argument. In Traditional Spelling many words do not reveal their origins to the non-expert — only etymologists can decipher them (eg “nought” from Old English ne = not, wiht = something). Spelling reform might add some words to this category, but probably not many (especially if the new system was a conservative one). Those interested in a word’s origins can always consult a dictionary.

In any case, what is more important, that a child learns to spell quickly and retains that ability in later life, or that a whole host of irregular spellings must be memorised just so that conceivably it may learn and appreciate the historical roots of a word? One needs a sense of proportion. There’s no point in trying to turn us all into etymologists. English spelling should be for the common people.

There are many words that sound the same but are spelled differently because they have different meanings. If we adopt a regular spelling, they will all be spelled the same. That would be confusing!

This was a bit of an obsession with Dr Johnson, who favoured different spellings to distinguish the various meanings of words that sounded the same. But are different spellings (heterographs) all that useful for distinguishing meaning? In everyday speech one can usually tell from context the separate meaning of words that sound the same.  (“The nun said she was having none of it.” “Reining in his horse, the king said there had been a lot of rain in the last few years of his reign.”)  And we already have quite a few words with traditional spelling that are pronounced and spelled the same but which have different meanings (kind, lap, ring, bank, etc). Depending on how radical the new scheme was, a revised spelling system would probably add to the number of words in this last category, but it would not represent a sea change.

The huge stock of printed books will become worthless.

We could deal with this objection by considering how books come to have value, and analysing the stock of printed books, but it is simpler to point to an existing previous case of spelling reform and its effect on the value of existing book stocks. Did the stock of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written around 1390, lose any value when Samuel Johnson revised English spelling with A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755?

If anything, the value of books written in out-of-date spelling can be expected to rise over time as a result of rarity.

The entries in this section make the case that even if spelling reform were desirable, it's not possible.

English does not have a governing body like the Académie Francaise for the French language. Therefore no-one has the authority to drive spelling reform. Without that, any attempt will just be chaotic.

The Society is not planning to drive change, but to enable it. The driving force, if there is any, will be supplied by ordinary people using the new spelling. If enough ordinary people, all over the world, use the new system, then it becomes the new standard. Just as there is no authority that can force change, no authority can block it either.

By publishing standards and allowing people to choose to adopt them has been successful in other areas of life. Perhaps the best known example is the World Wide Web. The standards that enable people all over the world to access information at the touch of a button are not forced on anyone. They are published and anyone who wishes to join in may adopt them freely. The same approach can be used for spelling reform. Whether a reformed spelling is adopted will depend on how potential users assess its costs and benefits.

People from different places speak English with different accents. If we spell as we speak, everyone will spell differently. A standard spelling cannot possibly be phonetic.

It's true that a standard phonetic spelling could not support different accents, because phonetic spelling (eg using the International Phonetic Alphabet) is designed specifically to capture and represent different accents. But the Spelling Society is not proposing a standard phonetic spelling.

Before looking at what the Society is proposing, look at how Traditional Spelling deals with accents. Wikipedia lists over 20 regional accents of English. The list is far from complete: for example it only has one entry for the entire United States, yet no-one could mistake Bronx for Texan.

Traditional Spelling deals with this variety because:

1. Everyone has the same spelling rules (apart from minor differences like humor vs humour). Words are spelled the same in all regions of the English Speaking World.
2. Each regional accent has its own pronunciation rules. Each accent applies its rules consistently, which is why you can tell a person's region from their accent.

The Society's goal is to reform spelling. We have not yet decided on the reformed spelling scheme (that is the job of the International English Spelling Congress) but it will be the same for all English speakers in the world. In other words, item #1 above will still hold.

It is not the Society's goal to change the spoken language. Regional accents will not be affected. It follows that each region will have its own own rules about how to pronounce the written word, just as they do at present. In other words, item #2 above will still hold.

Spelling rules will change, and pronunciation rules will change, but the reformed spelling will deal with regional accents just as Traditional Spelling does at present.

There have been many attempts at spelling reform in the past — see the History pages — and it has failed every time. It will fail this time too.

Just because previous attempts have failed does not mean a thing is impossible. But let’s look at this objection more carefully. First, it is not true that all previous attempts have failed. And there is good reason to think that a new attempt can succeed.

It is true that there have been many previous attempts, supported by very capable people, which have failed. But there have also been successes. For example:

• Samuel Johnson’s dictionary embodied spelling reform. Before Johnson’s dictionary, spelling was extremely irregular, and varied from person to person, as there was no accepted standard. Johnson’s dictionary introduced a standard. The Society thinks the standard needs revised, but Johnson undoubtedly succeeded in his aims.
• Noah Webster simplified some US spelling, eg plow vs plough. He did not achieve all of his aims but he did achieve some.
• Going further back in history, or further afield in geography, we can find other examples of success, such as the introduction of the Latin alphabet to English.

We also need to consider why the failed attempts failed. Previous attempts have, on the whole, been top-down in nature. That is, they viewed the English-speaking world as a kind of pyramid, and tried to impose change starting at the top. But the English-speaking world is not organised like this. It is not organised at all. There is no-one with any authority over the language — how it is spoken, written, or spelled. There are dictionaries, but (unlike Johnson’s) they do not try to control the language, only to record how it is used in practice. We teach spelling in schools but only to conform to common usage, and usage changes all the time. For example, disc is being replaced by disk. Right now, both spellings are acceptable, but perhaps in 10 or 20 years, disc will become so rare that it will be seen as a mistake.

There are many other examples like disc–disk; what they have in common is that no-one is in charge of the change, no-one is causing it to happen, and if it does happen, no-one can stop it. We can conclude that any attempt to drive spelling change by a show of force will fail. Which is why the Society does not propose to follow this approach.

Instead, the Society aims to enable change, by designing and promoting a better spelling scheme. Whether it is adopted is not in the Society’s control. In this respect, the Society’s plan is similar to Johnson’s in publishing his dictionary. But unlike Johnson, the Society has the benefit of the information technology revolution. We can develop software that converts between the old and new spelling schemes in an instant. Web pages can be made to flip to either spelling. Spellcheckers can be made to use a new dictionary. Writers using the new spelling scheme need not be cut off from readers who prefer the old, nor vice-versa.

Spelling reform has been tried before, and major reforms have been achieved. It is time for another major reform. Thanks to advances in information technology, everything is there to play for.

This goal is far too ambitious for a small group of people to consider. It involves changing the way almost the whole world communicates. Just who do you think you are?

It is ambitious. But pretty much all change has been piloted by small groups of people, and often by one person. Obviously it’s not possible for a handful of people to directly make enormous changes. But it is possible for a few people, or even one person, to enable, to inspire others and to lead the way. This has happened countless times in the past.

The specific tasks which the Society proposes, starting with the International English Spelling Congress, are not reaching for the stars. They are eminently feasible, planned and costed.

The key question is not how many people initiate an idea, but whether their idea is sound. If it is, change will follow.

Books are reprinted all the time. Spelling reform would not itself cause much, if any, extra reprinting. What would happen is that some books would be converted to the new spelling as they were reprinted. Over time, all new printing would use the new spelling, except for books of special historical interest. With modern technology conversion would not be a particularly difficult exercise.

In passing, it’s worth noting that we've been reprinting and converting books for quite some time to keep them readable. Compare these passages from King Lear — one from the 1623 edition, and one from a modern edition:

1623 First Folio edition           Current edition
Sir, I loue you more than          Sir, I love you more than
    words can weild ye matter,         word can wield the matter,
Deerer than eye-sight,             Dearer than eyesight,
    space, and libertie,               space, and liberty,
Beyond what can be valewed,        Beyond what can be valued,
    rich or rare,                      rich or rare,
No lesse then life, with grace,    No less than life, with grace,
    health, beauty, honor:             health, beauty, honour,
As much as Childe ere lou'd,       As much as childe e'er loved,
    or Father found.                   or father found.
A loue that makes breath poore,    A love that makes breath poor
    and speech vnable,                 and speech unable,
Beyond all manner of               Beyond all manner of
    so much I loue you.                'so much' I love you.

[from The History of English, http://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/history_early_modern.html]

Spelling reform would no more require every book to be reprinted than the UK's conversion to decimal currency required every asset to be repurchased.

The entries in this section make the case that the benefits of spelling reform would far outweigh its costs.

It takes children in Britain two or more years to catch up with the reading ability of children in other European countries.

[…] implying that the English-speaking groups needed 2.5 years of learning, or more than twice as much time as most other languages, to establish a most minimal and basic decoding function.

— (Seymour 2005, p311)

It is not yet possible to lay this entirely at the door of English spelling, as there are other factors to take into account. For example, English, as one of the Germanic languages, has a more complex syllable structure than Romance languages such as French or Italian. Whatever the reason, these extra years are a cost that our children pay. While British children are learning to read, children in other countries are reading and learning.

We cannot change the English syllable structure, but we can improve the spelling.

21.8% of people in the UK aged 16 to 65, in the period 1994 to 2003, were functionally illiterate ^{(UNDP 2009, table I2, p 180)}. This figure is, like any statistic, an estimate of some underlying true value. But phenomena like literacy are hard to define and measure. They are influenced by many complex factors and interpreting or even comparing statistics is far from simple. A broad brush approach seems prudent.

The table from which the figure is taken places the UK at the 21st place in a table of 36 "very high human development" nations, whose illiteracy ranges from 7.5% (Sweden) to 47% (Italy). Worldwide literacy rates have been rising for some time ^{(World Bank 2017, "literacy")}.

Various international organisations collect and publish statistics such as this. Doing so allows different countries to compare themselves with others, and enables the poorer performers to improve by adopting better techniques that can be seen to work elsewhere. However, there are many difficulties which affect the quality of the results of such a project.

• Surveys would need to be carried out regularly. However, literacy is not something that can be compared simply over a long timescale. Literacy in the in the Information Age: Final Report of the International Adult Literacy Survey ^{(OECD 2000)} is a comprehensive report, but it is gradually becoming dated.
• Many surveys are incomplete. Literacy Rates Continue to Rise from One Generation to the Next ^{(UNESCO 2017)} is a more recent report, but most of the English-speaking world is omitted, as shown by figure 1 on page 4 of the report.
• Self-reported statistics are not all of the same quality. A claim of 99.998% literacy by North Korea ^{(World Bank 2017, “literacy North Korea”)} may seem questionable.

Given the lack of suitable international statistics, we might consider national statistics.

• In the UK, 71% of pupils managed to reach the “expected standard” in reading in 2017 ^{(UK Education 2017)}. While this sounds positive, the fact remains that almost 30% of pupils did not make the grade.  Unfortunately the figure for spelling is bundled in with grammar and punctuation, which together scored 77%, so we cannot conclude much about that.

But the UK’s own statistics relate to Key Stage 2, ie roughly to the end of primary school, and they only cover England (ie not including Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland). It is also not obvious how to relate the “expected standard” with, say, the OECD definition of “literacy.”

It has long been known that if you are not so good at reading, you are more likely to end up in jail. For example:

• In Canada: “Offenders are three times as likely as the rest of the population to have literacy problems.” (CACP 2008, p 23)
• In the USA: “Adults in prison were far more likely than those in the population as a whole to perform in the lowest two literacy levels.” (Kirsch 2002, p xix)
• In the UK: “More than three-quarters of them cannot read, write or count to the standard expected of an 11-year-old.” (Jones 2010)

However, what these quotes assert is a correlation. Yes, it is true that if you are not so good at reading, you are more likely to end up in jail, but it is not necessarily just because you are not so good at reading. For example, if you are poor then you are more likely to be poor at reading ^{(Seymour 2005, p 298)}. Since poverty is associated with criminality, it may well be that poverty, not lack of reading skills, is the determining factor. Or, it may be that illiteracy contributes, say, 20% of the increased chances of criminality, while poverty contributes 80%. (I should point out that I made these percentages up to illustrate an idea — they have no basis in fact.)

Separating correlation and causality may seem like ivory-tower nit-picking, but it has serious implications. If we spend money teaching everyone to read, in the hope of reducing the prison population, we may simply end up with a more educated prison population. That’s not to say that teaching everyone to read is a bad idea — far from it — but public money is always limited and choices to spend here rather than there should always be based on sound knowledge.

The difficulty is that literacy, poverty, and criminality are just a few examples of human behaviour, and human behaviour is complex. It is hard to tease out the separate threads of cause and effect.

While prisoners have poorer literacy than the general population, they mostly come from certain sections of society, and when you compare the literacy of those who are locked up with those who are at liberty, from the same sections of society, there is no significant difference. The National Literacy Trust, who you might expect to argue for improving literacy under almost all circumstances, concluded:

“So, there is no conclusive evidence on whether prisoners do or do not have literacy skills that are worse than those of the general population.” (Clark 2008, p 8)

Of course this raises the question of why there is a correlation between low literacy skills and poverty. Does one cause the other? Or are they perhaps both caused by something else?

More recent work claims not only to have found a causal connection between low educational attainment and criminality, but also to have quantified it:

“Their results show that a 10% increase in the age at which people leave school would lower the number of convictions (per 1000 of the population) by 2.1%. They also show that reducing the proportion of people leaving school with no qualifications by 1% would reduce convictions for property crime by between 0.85%-1%. Their results concerning violent crime were largely statistically insignificant, which they say is likely to be because violent crime tends to be motivated by emotional rather than economic reasons.” [reported] (Woolliscroft 2013)

Note that this addresses low educational attainment, not just literacy. Statistical results like this, if substantiated, are as valuable as gold dust in informing public policy, though it is too often the case that for other reasons, they are not acted on. They illustrate a trend that continued research is moving beyond just acknowledging a correlation, and towards a more quantitative understanding of the relations between at least some of the factors.

There may be many complex and inter-related causes that lead to lives being wasted by crime. Making reading and writing easier is almost certainly not a complete solution, but it is not going to make things worse and the evidence is that it will help.

The entries in this section explain how spelling reform is a realistic goal.

The odds-and-ends section.

Although humans have found many ancillary uses for their languages, such as promoting regional or national identity and social class, the fundamental and primary purpose of any language is communication.  It is an absolute necessity for any form of communication, whether by human language, animal interaction of all sorts, radio waves, internet traffic, and so on, that the senders and receivers of the messages share a common code.  As far as written language is concerned, the way words are spelled is a vital part of its code.

It is true that, with modern English, there is a good deal of scope for variation in spelling – which can be tolerated, and even made use of, by those who are thoroughly familiar with the language – although it can present difficulties to learners, whether children or foreigners.  However it seems not always to be understood that this current scope for variation is wholly dependent on the existence of a set of word-spellings that, however bizarre, are, with few exceptions, shared by all English speakers.  Given that : (a) there are huge varieties in the way English words are pronounced in different areas, both within nations and throughout the world, and (b) there is not even a common understanding of the sounds which many of the individual letters of the English alphabet should represent : it is clear that the alternative spellings that individuals may see as appropriate to their own, and their neighbours' speech, will vary widely. 

If everyone were to start choosing their own spellings, to begin with their writing would be decipherable by most others, albeit with less efficiency, and that is seen in English today.  However it seems inescapable that with the passage of time, the spellings used would diverge more and more, and there would be ever fewer words with universally shared spellings, so that the usefulness of syntax to interpret difficult words and phrases would diminish and start to fail, and the writing eventually become altogether unintelligible.  We know that this has actually happened many times in the past, and the divergence of English from German is just one example.  The gradual transformation of the German word 'durch' into the modern English 'through', over the course of many centuries, is a classic case.

The currently popular abbreviated spellings and acronyms used primarily in text messages, such as 'gr8' for 'great' and 'LOL' for 'Laugh Out Loud' (or possibly 'Lots of Love'), are a form of shorthand.  There have been many such systems in the past, as far back as classical times 2000 years ago.  Samuel Pepys used one to write his diary, and before the coming of computer word-processing legal documents were commonly written, or latterly typed, in an intensely abbreviated English wording.  The fact is that none of the host of varieties of shorthand that have so far been invented have ever had any long-term impact on conventional spelling, and it seems highly likely that what is currently in vogue with phones will in due course lose its attraction and be forgotten.

You can read the Society's Aims and Objectives in this website.  If you feel that something along these lines needs to be done to overcome the national and international failure, after nearly 150 years of universal State Education in the UK, to make any significant inroads into the disastrously poor literacy of about 1 in 5 of the population, and you would like to help in any way at all, then please contact us via this website, or in any way convenient.  You certainly don't need to be an expert on spelling, still less on spelling reform.  To assess what assisting the Society might be like, you are welcome to attend any of our quarterly Meetings, some of which are held in central London, and some online by video and/or audio link.  They are open to non-Members, and there is no charge or obligation involved.  The Meetings deal largely with the Society's own necessary house-keeeping and ongoing projects, but they are also an opportunity for all to meet, to ask questions and to express views.

The Society is focussed on how English words are spelled, and does not attempt to address questions of grammar or punctuation, unless they directly concern spelling, which rarely occurs.  However the Society does take the view, as stated elsewhere, that the unnecessary difficulties presented by the current spellings also contribute significantly to other aspects of the present poor literacy of a large section of native English-speaking populations.  They do this in at least two ways:

1. The time that has to be spent in school on learning spellings could be more profitably directed to getting a better grip on other practical aspects of the language – grammar, punctuation, and so on.  Note that in countries with regularly-spelled languages, the children commonly spend no time at all in school in learning how to spell, and the subject does not exist in the curriculum ! 
2. It is clear that, for a substantial number of children – a minimum of about one in five of them (we know that because it is the perennial proportion of adults who end up as functionally illiterate in the UK and USA) – looking at simple printed English text is something akin to the effect on a literate adult of looking at text printed in an unfamiliar foreign language, possibly even one using a quite different alphabet.  Where this state of affairs persists for any length of time, it has a quite disastrous effect on the children's confidence, not only in their ability to learn to read, but in their ability to learn anything at all in school.  And in many respects, the inability to read does indeed have the latter effect.  In such circumstances, grammar and punctuation are obvious casualties.

The Society has a number of members who are experienced in public speaking and are who are willing to provide an interesting and informed contribution to your event. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

The Society isn’t promoting any particular set of changes at the moment. Instead we are organising an International English Spelling Congress that will permit people from across the English Speaking World to choose a new system designed to improve access to literacy while avoiding unnecessary and off-putting changes.

If it's about any aspect of English spelling, please use the Contact Us page and we will see what we can do.  It's a huge subject — English is thought to have more words, and a more complicated spelling system, than practically any other language.  We don't profess to know everything there is to know about it, but if it's about the general history of English spellings, or about the attempts to simplify them that have been going on for the last 500 years or so, then maybe we can help, or at least point you in the right direction.  If your question is about the history of particular words (their etymology) then it's best to consult dictionaries, or use the free online dictionary (www.wiktionary.org — which also covers other languages), or, failing that, find a friendly lexicographer.