Why is English spelling so irregular?

No single cause explains it. English spelling was only loosely fixed when pronunciation began to change sharply, and it then absorbed spelling habits from French scribes, Dutch printers and Latin-minded scholars. No official body ever reformed it. The result is that the same sound can be spelled many ways, and the same letters can stand for different sounds. [1] [2]

Pronunciation changes faster than spelling, and English shows this strongly. The Great Vowel Shift altered the long vowels of Middle English between roughly the 1400s and 1700. According to the New Criterion, what is now said as bite was once said as beet, and out was once said as oot. The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen first studied and named the shift. The BBC notes that the reasons for it remain unclear. Spelling did not follow the new sounds. [2] [3] [4]

Some consonants also went silent but stayed in writing, which explains knight and knock. The old gh sound, once a throaty kh, became f in laughter or disappeared in daughter, while the spelling remained. [2] [3]

In the early 15th century the Chancery Standard, used by official bodies, tried to standardize spelling. According to the Spelling Society it mixed English and French conventions, which accounts for many modern problems. Printing then added more. William Caxton brought printers from the Low Countries who were unused to English, and they introduced errors and Dutch habits, such as the h in ghost. Printers also tended to lengthen words, partly for money. Early English Bibles, often printed abroad, spread further variety because people copied spellings from whatever version they could see. [4] [3]

Renaissance scholars added letters to show a word's Latin ancestry, so peple became people and det gained its b in debt. Some of these guesses were wrong: island comes from Old English iegland, not Latin insula, so its s is a mistake. [3]

English uses a Latin alphabet for a language with many more sounds. The New Criterion puts the total in the forties, against about 38 for French and 25 for Spanish, so letters must do double duty. English also kept the spellings of many borrowed words, such as ballet and pizza, where other languages, such as Norwegian and Finnish, often respell loanwords. [2] [3]

English also has no academy like the Académie Française (1635) or the Real Academia Española (1713), so it was never systematically reformed. Dictionaries only became common in the later 17th century, and Samuel Johnson's appeared in 1755. The Spelling Society, which campaigns for reform, says there has never been a serious, co-ordinated attempt to repair the irregularities. [2] [1]