Spell It Out

The singular story of English spelling

David Crystal

• Publisher: Profile Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781846685682
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847658227
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Writing & Presentation Skills

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The nature of the problem
• Chapter 2: The beginning
• Chapter 3: The size of the problem
• Chapter 4: Building the alphabet
• Chapter 5: The basic weaknesses
• Chapter 6: Keeping things long
• Chapter 7: Keeping things short
• Chapter 8: The first exceptions
• Chapter 9: Seeing the link
• Chapter 10: Know your Latin and French
• Chapter 11: New letters for old
• Chapter 12: Old letters in new words
• Chapter 13: Old sounds in new positions
• Chapter 14: New sounds in old places
• Chapter 15: More exceptions
• Chapter 16: Showing the difference
• Chapter 17: Noting the similarity
• Chapter 18: New sounds in old letters
• Chapter 19: A printer’s practice
• Chapter 20: The urge to reform
• Chapter 21: Remembering Latin
• Chapter 22: More etymologies
• Chapter 23: Famous spellings
• Chapter 24: Spelling ‘rules’
• Chapter 25: The role of personalities
• Chapter 26: Another personality
• Chapter 27: Printers and publishers
• Chapter 28: Changing practices
• Chapter 29: The Internet
• Chapter 30: Showing identity
• Chapter 31: Unpredictability
• Chapter 32: Exotic vowels
• Chapter 33: Exotic consonants
• Chapter 34: Spelling noises
• Chapter 35: Abbreviating
• Chapter 36: Learning the system
• Chapter 37: The future of English spelling
• A teaching appendix
• Further reading
• Illustration credits
• Index of words
• General index