Henry is the author of Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell Detroit News, December 1906. Roosevelt sits stunned in a boxing ring after losing his match with the ...

Take a look at the following English words: butcher, squirrel, mortgage, and choir. Does something seem off about them? At one point in time, the words move and love rhymed. So did blood, good, and ...

English spelling is crazy. Even people born and raised in English-speaking societies who speak no other language still often have a lot of trouble with English spelling. You may think that English is ...

Tear in eye your dress you’ll tear. So shall I! Oh, hear my prayer, Pray, console your loving poet, Make my coat look new, dear, sew it? Just compare heart, beard and heard, Dies and diet, lord and ...

Spellers compete in The Denver Post 72nd Annual Colorado State Spelling Bee at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver on Mar. 10, 2012. Spellers compete in The Denver Post 72nd Annual Colorado State ...

English, whatever its merits as a language, is a bitch to spell. There are so many rules, and so many exceptions, and yet in the end you have to learn a lot of words on a case-by-case basis. If future ...

STORY: Why is English so hard to spell? There are clear differences between how words are written and how they are said. If English is your first language you may not realize it’s not that normal. In ...

My 11-year-old student sighs. How can the same letters make so many different sounds? We are looking at the letter combination “ough”, which can be read in seven different ways: “through”, “thorough”, ...

This May, students from across the United States will gather in Washington D.C., for the 100th anniversary of the Scripps Spelling Bee, determined to conquer a spelling system that has baffled us for ...