Blog Posts - Learn English Spelling Rules

Don’t Slur the Ending

2/14/2018

English speakers often slur the endings of words, with the result that they have difficulty spelling the words. Words ending in a vowel or an R sound are often reduced to just an “uh.”

We can thank Noah Webster for simplifying at least some of our spelling. He's one who got rid of the imitation French -our endings, as in labor/labour, honor/honour, color/colour, etc. And Noah also got rid of the French –re ending in words like center/centre, theater/theatre, etc. Centuries ago, we borrowed hundreds of words from the French, but they are now English words which we pronounce in the English manner. And we now spell them in the English way…well, with the exception of Englishmen who stubbornly cling to many of those outdated French spellings.

This leaves us with just three simple endings to worry about: -er, -or, and -ar. But relax. They're easy to explain.

The -ar ending is used mainly with adjectives. For example, familiar, regular, circular, solar, vulgar, etc. However, we must remember that at least sixty commonly used nouns also end in -ar. These include dollar, calendar, molar, and grammar.

The -er ending is used mainly with occupations and persons who carry out an action. For example: swimmer, conjurer, baker, teacher, adviser. We also use the –er ending with single-syllable comparative adjectives: bigger, smaller, faster, slower.

So where does the -or ending fit in? It's used when the root word ends in T or S. Actor, visitor, collector, professor, sponsor, and supervisor are common examples.

For a period during the 18th century, French spellings were fashionable, and a number of words were spelled with -or and even –our: governor/governour, which comes from Old French governoeur, and ambassador, which comes from the French ambassadeur. Councilor and counselor both come from the Old French conseillour, but surveyor comes from surveier and should logically end in -er.

A small group of these words still use -or despite the fact that they describe a person doing something: author and survivor. But one small word has changed; jailor may now be spelled jailer. One warning, however, for you land-lubbers. A sailer is a type of ship, while a sailor is a seaman.

Is Spelling Important? (Consider life guards who can’t swim)

2/7/2018

No teacher would tell a student that the square root of 16 is 4 and not explain why. Or that 9 is the square of 3 and say that squares and square roots are just things that have to be memorized and accepted as a fact.

But that is the way we teach spelling. “It just is,” we say. “Get used to it.”

With all due respect to math teachers, I say that the ability to spell correctly is as important as squares and square roots, as important as algebra. Yet we expect math teachers to be fully competent in their field and science teachers to know their subject thoroughly. But spelling teachers are not expected to even be good spellers.

When I enrolled in teacher training college (all those many years ago), I was not given a spelling test. None of my courses were about teaching spelling. Nobody taught us the spelling rules. I was not given any kind of spelling test before I graduated and went off to teach, among other things, spelling.

Things have not changed much since those days. In North America, there is no teacher training institute that teaches the spelling rules or tests the spelling ability of its students before they graduate. It’s rather like training life guards and not checking on whether or not they can swim.

Naturally, thousands of English teachers are good spellers. They take pride in their spelling skill and try to pass it on to their students. At the same time, all too many teachers have serious problems with spelling, and even some boast about the fact that they never were good at spelling. And they are supposed to teach spelling. What is the solution? These teachers can begin by purchasing my new book, How to Teach English Spelling.

How You Learned to Spell

1/31/2018

I bet I know how you learned to spell. Your teacher gave you twenty words on Monday then on Friday she a gave a spelling test. That’s the way my teachers taught me, and my father before me and probably his father before him.

There’s nothing wrong with the system. In fact I often used it myself. The twenty-word list allows the teacher to keep a reasonably accurate record of the students’ progress, and it’s also something concrete to show a parent or administrator.

The weakness in this method is in choosing those twenty words for the weekly spelling test. Teachers use many ways to choose them, but all too often it ends with students having to memorize a mixed bunch of random words, many of which have weird spellings.

The method I offer in my new book, How to Teach English Spelling, is based on the logical theory that if the students know WHY the word is spelled that way, they are much more likely to remember how to spell it. This means that the spelling rules must be taught and the list of words for that week must consist of carefully chosen examples of that rule.

It works! From experience, I have found that when very young students and beginning foreign students are taught that, “the silent E changes the sound of the vowel that precedes it,” and they are given a list of examples, they accept the idea very quickly and usually have no trouble with it.

Children, and most adults, want to know WHY. Once the WHY is explained, they are much more ready to accept a particular spelling and to retain it in their long-term memories.

Teaching Spelling

1/24/2018

I have just finished writing another book about spelling. I wrote How to Teach English Spelling because an extremely frustrated school principal asked me to.

This principal was frustrated because, year after year, his new teachers would arrive keen and eager to get to work but without the slightest idea how to teach spelling. They had taken all their required college classes and had their heads full of education psychology, theory, and statistics…but as to how to teach their students how to spell? They didn’t even know where to start. It didn’t take long before teaching spelling became a chore, and the teachers went through the motions with little enthusiasm. The result was that spelling scores plummeted and students’ reading ability soon followed.

The method of teaching spelling that I propose (and used myself when I was a teacher) is quite simple. It's based on the logical idea that if the students know WHY the word is spelled that way and if they are taught the spelling rule that covers that word, they will remember how to spell the word.

For example, when students see thick and think or back and bask, they are confused because one word in the pair contains a CK but the other has only a K. But the CK and the K have almost the same sound. When the spelling rule is explained to them, they quickly understand and can apply it to every other word they come across that ends in either K or CK.

As well as teaching the spelling rules in my new book, I also stress the importance of syllabication. If students know the correct way to break a word into its component syllables and pronounce it slowly, they will have less of a problem spelling it. Naturally, alongside syllabication I also stress correct enunciation, a subject that has been sadly neglected for far too long.

Plumbers’ Plums

1/17/2018

If bricklayers lay bricks, why don’t plumbers lay plums? That school boy joke ignores the fact that plumb comes from the Latin word plumbum and refers to lead. The Romans used lead for pipes and roofs, and they still used lead for pipes and some roofing well into the 20th century. More importantly, plumbers were the first engineers, not because of the metal they used but because of their tools and their skills.

The great civilizations that appeared and disappeared in the Middle East for centuries before the Roman period were dependent on water. Babylon, for example, flourished about 6,000 B.C.E. The city was famous for its gardens and fed a huge population in an area of limited rainfall. Water was brought in from distant mountains by means of aqueducts, canals, and underground tunnels.

Planning and building these water systems required great skill, and the men (plumbers) who built them had to rely on just three or four primitive tools—the level, the T-square, the plumb line, and a knotted cord. The level was usually a dish-like container filled with water or oil. The T-square was wooden and came in many sizes. The plumb on the long plumb line was a small but heavy pointed object, usually lead.

Not only did those early plumbers build great and enduring water systems, but they also built palaces and temples. The plumb line was essential to keep the square square and to keep the level level. Without that length of cord with its lead weight, the great pyramids of Egypt would never have been so perfectly aligned, and the lovely cathedrals of medieval Europe would have fallen down long ago.

Today we still use the words level, square, and plumb, especially in the building trades. The tools have hardly changed during the last few thousand years.

The Romans and Their Language—Latin

1/11/2018

The Romans ruled Britain for roughly 350 years. For most of that period, the dominant language on the island was Latin, which was the only acceptable language used in communication. But when the Romans left, in about 400 AD, a strange thing happened. In other parts of the Western Roman Empire—France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and even distant Romania, as well as a number of smaller areas such as Catalonia—the Latin language remained and variations of Latin eventually became the national languages. Over time, of course, the original Latin changed in sound, spelling, and sometimes meaning, but French, Italian, Spanish, etc., were still Romance languages.

In Britain, however, the invading Germanic tribes--Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and others—imposed their languages on the land and almost completely wiped out all traces of Latin. Apart from some place names and the slowly deteriorating road system, all traces of the Romans vanished. With successive Danish invasions, the language of much of Britain became a form of Danish. The only places where Latin survived were the Christian churches and the monasteries. But Latin was never taught to the general public. People considered Latin only a church language.

When Latin did return to England, the language came in a great flood with the French invasion led by William the Conqueror in the 11th century. William of Normandy, spoke French, a Romance language, and very soon the Norman French of the conquerors was overcoming the Anglo-Saxon of the conquered to create a unique mixture of languages. The medieval British spoke a Germanic/Latin language.

During the Renaissance, when Latin became the international language of Europe, Latin based words took their place alongside Germanic words in the English language. This is why we now speak a fascinating language that is unique, flexible, and rich with history.

What’s in a Name?

1/4/2018

It depends on whose name it is. Although Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush toilet, he did improve it and his plumbing company, which supplied the Royal Family, made him rich and famous. So famous that his name became synonymous with the flush toilet. I suppose we can call it fame. The word “crap” has nothing to do with Thomas, however; it actually means chaff or rubbish. Today, of course, neither crap nor crapper is considered polite.

My father usually called that little room the “loo,” a word I long associated with Waterloo. It actually comes from the French phrase gardez l’eau, a warning yelled by the servant when waste water was dumped out of the window. “Watch out for the water!” the servant would yell. The liquid wasn’t always water.

In colonial India, they had the “thunder box,” which was a wooden box with a hole in the top and a lid over the hole. The box was secured to the outside wall, and a servant could reach through a hole in the wall to remove the ceramic pot. A bolt on the lid of the box prevented animals or a (very small) burglar from getting into the house.

The great stone castles of medieval Europe also had toilets. These small, private chambers usually emptied into the moat and the smell in the chamber was so toxic that it killed moths and other insects. This made it a handy place to store heavy winter clothing, and so the room came to be called a garde robe, another French phrase that became the English “wardrobe.”

My brothers and I usually called the room the “lav,” which is short for “lavatory,” which comes from the Latin lavare, “to wash.” My sisters preferred to call it the “toilet,” which was originally the French toilette and meant a vanity table in a dressing room. Toilet sounds nicer than other names for what today we usually call the “bathroom,” whether or not there is a bathtub in the room.

Now and then my father would call it the “jakes.” Some years later I learned that this word came from the French name Jacques, or John in English. Being named John, I didn’t particularly like that association of words. But worse was to follow. When I moved to North America, I discovered that many people actually call the bathroom the john. (Note that unlike my name, it’s not capitalized.) In my opinion, anything is better than “the john.” Perhaps we could revive the almost vanished term WC for “water closet”?

Double Plurals

12/27/2017

English plurals can sometimes be very strange, especially if the root word has been borrowed from another language. Take the Italian word maestro. In its native land, the plural is maestri, but in English it is maestros. Similarly, that tasty pasta we call spaghetti is actually the plural of spago, the Italian word for a piece of string.

Then, of course, we have a few words that have no plural. Sheep are sheep. You can’t call them sheeps or sheepses. Which reminds me…real fishermen never call what they catch fishes. Fish are fish, never fishes.

Just to make things interesting, we also have about a dozen words that are quite irregular. We can talk about houses and spouses, but we can’t say that mouses have louses. It’s mice have lice. And it’s definitely not “hice” and “spice.”

But how about plural plurals? One has amused my editor for a while—opus. This word comes from the Latin and means “work.” The word “work” comes from the old Germanic weorc and can be pluralized. For example, “Shakespeare’s works.”

But the plural of opus is opera (“works”) and—in English—the plural of opera is operas. So we do have a plural plural.

Fortunately, time and usage have separated opus and opera. An opera is now a singular word. “Beethoven wrote only one opera, while Scarlatti wrote more than fifty operas.”

The word opus does have a plural form: opuses. But this is gradually giving way to “works” (“the works of Haydn”) and the plural word opuses is very rarely, if ever, used.

The Flying Dutchman

12/20/2017

Dutch is a difficult language for foreigners to learn, so the Dutch solve the problem by learning English, French, German, and any other language they consider useful. They must be the most multilingual people in Europe. They have given the English language a great number of words, ranging from cookie and Yankee to Howitzer and Knapsack.

The name Dutch is not quite correct. It’s based on Deutsche, which means “people” in German. The Dutch live in Holland, but that is the name of only one region of the country. Officially, the country is called The Netherlands, which means “low lands,” and the language is Dutch, which in Belgium they call Flemish. Now you know why most Dutchmen—oops! Nederlanders speak English so well.

The Dutch have been excellent sailors for a thousand years or more. If you own any kind of boat, you will inevitably be using Dutch words. Are you the skipper of a smack, a sloop, a ketch, or a scow? Maybe you’re the commodore of a cruiser or a yacht? You walk the deck up to the bow to check the jib and bang your head on the boom. You peer over the bulwark at the dock before you hoist sail. You yell “Avast there, you lubbers!” at your crew and watch for the buoy that marks the shoal that has not been dredged. As a precaution, you test the pump. You don’t want a leak if you meet an iceberg. That freight you have onboard doesn’t mean you are a smuggler. Best of luck, and put a shot of brandy or gin in your coffee.

The “Flying Dutchman” is the name of a phantom ship that sails round and round the globe, never to dock. There have been historical sightings of the ship over the past two or three centuries, but skeptics say these were optical illusions. In 1843, German composer Richard Wagner wrote an opera in which the ship’s captain, who once invoked Satan, is doomed to sail forever until he is redeemed by the love of a woman.

A little known historical fact: In 1688, Prince William of Orange (a royal family in the Netherlands) led a fleet of more than fifty warships and hundreds of transports loaded with 40,000 men and 4,000 horses that landed in Kent, England, where he had been invited to take the English throne because he was married to the daughter of James II, who had been overthrown. William was crowned William III, and James II (last of the house of Stewart and a Scotsman) was sent packing. William’s fleet was the biggest ever to be seen in the English Channel until the Normandy Invasion during World War 2. It was also the last successful “invasion” of Britain, which neither Napoleon nor Hitler was able to do.

Learning How to Spell

12/13/2017

Every experienced teacher knows more than one way to teach most subjects, but spelling is different. However we approach spelling, we still end up having to memorize the correct spelling of every word.

In the days before television and computers, people actually read books and wrote letters on paper with pens and typewriters. They regularly read and wrote words, and this constant repetition helped them to remember how to spell the words correctly.

But in those ancient days, they still memorized lists of words. And they did it the way I did, and my father did, and you most probably did. They received twenty words on Monday and had a spelling test on Friday. During the week, the teacher helped the class study the words, but the onus fell to the student to memorize them for the Friday test.

I don't see anything wrong with this system. I used it myself when I taught school. Parents expect this method which gives students a performance record to show their parents. The main problem is choosing appropriate words for the students. Depending on their ages and abilities, I always preferred to use words that illustrated a spelling rule.

Taking words from lists like “The 50 Most Difficult Words” or “The 100 Hardest Words to Spell” is, of course, a silly waste of time. It promotes short-term memory only. The ideal would be for students to read more books or magazines or even comics. In the meantime, we have to fall back on old-fashioned memorization. It worked for our parents. Why shouldn’t it work for us, too?