David Crystal

A lesser-known history of English spelling by the award-winning author of The Story of English in 100 Words is presented through engaging, pithy chapters that cover such topics as the introduction of the Roman alphabet, each letter's origins and the development of long and short vowels.

The Curious, Enthralling and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling

Spell It Out

Why is there an 'h' in ghost? William Caxton, inventor of the printing press and his Flemish employees are to blame: without a dictionary or style guide to hand in fifteenth century Bruges, the typesetters simply spelled it the way it sounded to their foreign ears, and it stuck. Seventy-five per cent of English spelling is regular but twenty-five per cent is complicated, and in Spell It Out, our foremost linguistics expert David Crystal extends a helping hand to the confused and curious alike. He unearths the stories behind the rogue words that confound us, and explains why these peculiarities entered the mainstream, in an epic journey taking in sixth century monks, French and Latin upstarts, the Industrial Revolution and the internet. By learning the history and the principles, Crystal shows how the spellings that break all the rules become easier to get right.

The Singular Story of English Spelling

Spell it Out

Katherine Yang

Good writing, as with the author's other books, but the subject is… quite aggravating. At times horrendously fascinating in its seemingly random convolutions, but it makes me feel for those learning English as a second language. 

The book is highly thorough, with chapters about new vowel sounds, new consonant sounds, old vowels for new purposes, etc etc—super interesting to see (and, inevitably, as with most things about vocabulary and spelling, to mouth or whisper) the many examples of etymological origin or historical change littered throughout, but it began to feel a bit fatiguing toward the end. 

Still, always here for some good linguistic descriptivism.


Nor is staying with traditional attitudes towards spelling an option. We — everyone, not just teachers — need to change the way we think about it. We have to stop cursing it in solely negative terms — as a daunting barrier, as a hostile mountain, as an apparently perpetual process of rote learning — and start thinking of it as a voyage of exploration. 


On that forward-looking note, I found the final chapters about the Internet's potential influence on language and the future of English spelling quite thought-provoking. He gives pairs such as rhubarb → rubarb, recommend → recomend, and minuscule → miniscule as examples of misspellings on the Internet potentially becoming accepted variant spellings. For minuscule/miniscule, this is the usage note in the Oxford Dictionary:


The standard spelling is minuscule rather than miniscule. The latter form is a very common one (accounting for almost half of citations for the term in the Oxford English Corpus), and has been recorded since the late 19th century. It arose by analogy with other words beginning with mini-, where the meaning is similarly ‘very small’. It is now so widely used that it can be considered as an acceptable variant, although it should be avoided in formal contexts.


I think this is one of the themes of the book that I really enjoyed, the idea that language, especially one as open to foreign influences as English, is perpetually evolving. Perhaps the irregularity of English spelling sees some smoothing out over the course of history, as its users perceive existing patterns and warp language ever so slightly so it makes more sense to them, but foreign words and neologisms (most prominently, words introduced/influenced by technology) keep seeping in, and the river of linguistic variation narrows and widens thusly.

Spell It Out The Curious, Enthralling and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling

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