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 ...

Some of the brightest young minds just finished showcasing their knowledge of the English language. While most might never reach their level of expertise, we wanted to know: Why do we struggle to ...

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 ...

If you're a kid learning how to write, or an adult speaker of a language with sensible spelling, English spelling can seem like a cruel prank. And even if you're a completely literate adult native ...

I watched from the edge of my seat Friday night as fourteen-year-old Anamika Veeramani calmly and correctly spelled the word “stromuhr” on national television, becoming the winner of the 2010 Scripps ...

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”, ...

You've probably noticed that English spelling is not as consistent or phonetically reliable as the spelling of many other languages. Writing English is sort of like one of those computer games where ...

One of the best things going on around 200 B.C.E. (from this linguist’s point of view, at least) was that a librarian in Alexandria, Aristophanes of Byzantium, invented the first punctuation system ...

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