Spelling and pronunciation - making sense of augh and ough

A well-known poem on the difficulties of English pronunciation starts:

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, though, and through

And we might say that this applies just as much to spelling. Words with ough and augh are often cited as examples of our 'crazy' spelling system, and it's true that ough can have as many as seven or eight different sounds. But there aren't that many of these words, and they're quite easy to master.

Exploring spelling and pronunciation, Part 1

Complex, yes. But impossible?

The complexity of English spelling undoubtedly poses problems for both foreign learners and native speakers.

While some languages, like Spanish for example, have a clear relationship between spelling and sound, this is not always the case with English. Where Spanish has more or less one letter for each sound, English can use anywhere between one and four - let's take the sound /u:/, it can be expressed with one letter - who, with two letters - too, with three letters - Hugh, and with four letters - through.

And in English, the same letter can have several different sounds, for example a in - can, cane, car, care.

Because many of the most commonly used words in English have apparently irregular spelling, it can sometimes look as though English has no spelling rules at all. It has been estimated, however, that roughly 80% of words follow regular patterns, and that's what I want to explore in this series of posts, as well as looking at some of the main irregularities.

In this first post, I'll be looking at the sounds represented by one vowel in simple one-syllable words.

Just how American are the origins of center, scepter and theater, spellingwise?

One of the differences between British and American spelling is between those words that end in -re in British English and -er in American English, such as fibre / fiber. In this post I look at five words ending in -tre / -ter - centre, lustre, mitre, sceptre and theatre.

Talking about the differences between British and American spelling at Oxford Dictionaries, they say:

The differences often come about because British English has tended to keep the spelling of words it has absorbed from other languages (e.g. French), while American English has adapted the spelling to reflect the way that the words actually sound when they're spoken.

Oxford Dictionaries

Which I understand to mean that these words entered English with their (for example) French spelling, and were later changed in American English. This change is usually attributed to Noah Webster, and especially to his An American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828. So I was rather surprised when I came across an instance of theater in a British book from the seventeenth century.

Thackeray's use of -ise/-ize verbs in Vanity Fair

In which I list all the instances of this type of verb in Mr. Thackeray's fine work and note certain inconsistencies in the spelling thereof, and do the same for Mr. Darwin and his Origin of Species.