Do you have trouble with your spelling in English, don’t worry you are not alone. Read on to find out more about why spelling is so difficult in English.

I have read that English has 1,100 different ways to write the 44 different sounds made by the 26 letters in the English alphabet. That is a lot of ways to spell just a few sounds! All of these different spelling combinations result in some of the tricky English words like:

• Homophones – words that have the same sounds but are spelled differently

• Words with silent letters

and

• Spelling rules that have exceptions.  For example here is a great spelling rule in English: “i before e, except after c” as in the word ‘piece’ ‘relief’ and ‘receipt.’ This rule works most of the time, but not with these words: ‘weird,’ ‘conscience’ – these are exceptions to the rule!

There are many reasons for all of the crazy spellings of words in English.  For some words, the pronunciation has changed over time, but the spelling was not changed. Other words have been borrowed from other languages, and kept their original spellings, but English speakers have decided to pronounce the words according to English pronunciation rules.  There are other reasons too, but what matters the most is learning how to pronounce words even with their funny English spelling. Here is a great website for you to use to help you learn how to recognize and pronounce strangely spelled words in English. This website looks at words like:

enough – where the ‘ough’ is pronounced ‘uff’
and
through – where the ‘ough’ is pronounced ‘ew’

and it gives you some hints on English spelling rules.

I hope you find this website as helpful as I do.

You may also want to look back on these other posts I have written about spelling in English:

How do you spell that again?

Spelling test

Rules for Spelling Differences Between British and American English