Headline for page asking “why is english so hard to spell?”

For many Americans, spelling bees are a part of growing up in the United States. The challenge is obvious. From the moment kids begin to learn to read, there are clear differences between how words are pronounced and how they are spelled. Those who speak English as their first language may not realize that this is virtually unique among the major alphabetic languages. As John McWhorter, author of “Words on the Move,” writes, “English spelling is a tragic accident that steers us away from what’s happening in our mouths.”

Languages like Italian or Finnish have spelling and pronunciation that line up much more readily. According to a paper by Philip Seymour in the British Journal of Psychology, children learning reading and writing in languages like these can achieve greater than 90% accuracy by the end of their first year, while English students are far below this level even after years of learning. English is the collector and assimilator of the world’s words and retains all their color and irregularities. The spelling bee transforms all this craziness into a feature, not a bug.

A brief history of the English language in three paragraphs

one

English, originally a Germanic language, derives its grammar and basic vocabulary from German and Dutch. Over the years, the British isles saw waves of invasions — the Romans, the Vikings, and then, in 1066, the Normans, who put French in the driver's seat for several generations. Old English was spoken during this time, but documents around governance and legal matters were largely in French, while Latin was used by academics and religious orders. Thus, the English vocabulary grew larger than Germanic or Romance languages as French and Latin words entered into the common lexicon.

two

The invention and spread of the printing press in the late 1400’s spurred the growth of record keeping, manuscripts and other written documents which in turn helped solidify the norms around spelling. During this era, pronunciation generally followed the spellings and vice versa. But that was a short lived luxury.

three

Language normally evolves fairly slowly as words are passed back and forth between geographies and generations. However, in the 1500’s, a phenomenon known as ‘The Great Vowel Shift’ spread dramatically through southern England, shifting the pronunciation of all long vowels. The word “bite,” for example, was pronounced closer to “beet” in 1400, before shifting through the centuries to our current sound. The Great Vowel Shift and subsequent permutations divorced the written from the spoken word, leaving a legacy that is still with us today. While this can make English more challenging to learn, it also functions as a kind of time capsule hidden in the spelling. Brian M. Sietsema, an Associate Pronouncer for the Scripps National Spelling Bee, appreciates that feature. “It’s beautiful the way the words preserve, like in amber, all the facts of history.”

Inconsistent consonants

Some letters in English have come to represent more than one sound. Individual reasons vary, but these letters can often be found in words that have been borrowed from outside languages (called loanwords) and retain parts of their original pronunciation and spelling. This can effectively create multiple sounds for single consonants, such as the letter C sounding like an “S”, which is directly inherited from French.

Sound Spelling
k cat/cop
s city/cycle
Sound Spelling
ks box/fix/fox
gz exam
z xylophone
Sound Spelling
kw queen/question
k antique/bouquet

The vowelphabet

There are 26 letters in the English language, and roughly 44 sounds, depending on dialect*. Consonants are more straightforward, with 24 of the sounds representing 21 consonants. They are made by limiting airflow with teeth, lips or tongue while speaking. The other 20 or so are vowel sounds and are shaped by the unobstructed mouth and throat. Since so many sounds are created by just five letters (plus sometimes Y), linguists have a diagram to show how and where they are formed in the mouth.

Notably, at the center of all the sounds is the universal schwa sound. The schwa sound (”uhhh”) is formed in the middle of the mouth and requires no effort with the mouth or throat. Dr. Sietsema looks at it as the beginning of all other vowels. “The schwa is a lump of clay, and everything else you do with your lips, tongue and palette shapes that clay into the individual vowels.”

The schwa, perhaps because it is the vowel sound requiring the least effort to produce, has become fairly pervasive in English. It is often seen sneaking its way into pronunciations as they evolve or to provide emphasis (“please” becomes “PUH-lease!”). Most vowels represent a few sounds, though the schwa is unique in that its sound can be conjured by all of the vowels in the alphabet. So it can be particularly challenging to reverse engineer a word containing the schwa sound from just hearing it spoken. Which is why this sound at the center of the English language has become known as the bane of all spelling bee contestants.

Th e Bee

The Scripps National Spelling Bee has been held every year since 1925, with slight pauses for WWII and the recent pandemic. The bee’s roots are drawn from the 1800’s, when smaller and more local grassroots competitions occurred across the states. They used a popular spelling book by Noah Webster (of later dictionary fame) that sought to standardize spelling and remove British forms such as the ou in colour and the k from musick. The Scripps National Spelling Bee carries on the tradition by using the Merriam-Webster dictionary as its source of words to this day.

This year, 234 qualifying spellers under the age of 16 from all over the country will compete. Spellers will have two minutes to decode the words the announcers present. During the first 90 seconds, they can ask up to five questions that may unlock information about how the word has evolved in English and, hopefully, clues to its proper spelling.

Dr. Sietsema explains the process with a sample word and shows the complexity that can arise within the two minutes each speller has to come up with the correct spelling.

The number of words the contestants could potentially be tested on during the first two rounds of the National Spelling Bee comes to about 4,000. The participants are tested on the spelling of these words in the first round, and on their meanings in the second. After that, any word in the dictionary is fair game, which jumps the word count from 4,000 to around 470,000, and the words become progressively more difficult in each successive round.

In the last decade, spellers have raised the intensity of the competition, with ties occurring in 2014, 2015 and 2016, culminating with the “octo-champs”, when eight spellers were all crowned co-champion in 2019. The spelling bee has adjusted the rules slightly since then by implementing a more challenging second round when spellers are tested on word meanings before moving into the rest of the spelling rounds. And to avoid the likelihood of a tie, a lightning round spell-off will determine who to crown as the one true winner.

Editorial Director for the Scripps National Spelling Bee Corrie Loeffler thinks the spelling bee’s enduring appeal is derived from the hard work the spellers put in. “There is a precociousness that is so fun to watch and really easy to play along and that makes it fun,” she said. “But there is also high drama in a spelling competition. It demands pretty much perfection from its champion and there aren’t a lot of competitions out there that expect that.”

Sources

Foundation literacy acquisition in European orthographies, Seymour et al, 2003 British Journal of Psychology; Words on the Move, John McWhorter; Scripps National Spelling Bee; Preply

Additional development by

Julia Wolfe and Ally J. Levine

Edited by

Julia Wolfe, Rosalba O’Brien

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