Why is English so confusing? - Arika Okrent

It was June 2010.

Inside the Scripps National Spelling Bee,

contestants between 8- and 15-years-old wrestled words

like brachydactylous and leguleian.

Outside, a crowd protested the complexity of English spelling conventions.

Indeed, spelling reformers have been around for centuries,

advocating for overarching changes to make English spelling more intuitive.

The English language is chock-full of irregularities.

One commonly used example of this: take the “g-h” sound from “enough,”

the “o” sound from “women,” and the “t-i” sound from “action,”

and you could argue that “g-h-o-t-i” spells “fish.”

So, how did English get like this?

English arose from old Germanic tribes that invaded the British Isles

more than 1,500 years ago.

Their languages coalesced and evolved into Old English.

When Roman missionaries arrived around 600 CE,

they devised ways to write it down using the Latin alphabet,

supplementing it with some Germanic runes for sounds they didn’t have letters for.

Then came the Norman invasion of 1066 when French speakers conquered England.

French became the language of authority and high society.

But English remained the dominant spoken language.

Over time, those descended from French speakers also became English speakers,

but some French words snuck into the language.

Some English speakers were also familiar with Latin through the church

and formal education.

By the mid-1400s, people were writing in English again—

but it was unstandardized.

They used a mix of influences to determine word choice and spelling,

including the French they knew, the Latin they studied,

and the English they spoke.

So, things were already pretty messy.

Then, in 1476, the printing press arrived in England.

Some of the people working the presses may have mainly spoken Flemish—

not English.

And they were given manuscripts that varied widely in their spelling.

Without standardization, different writers went with various spellings

based in part on what they happened to encounter while reading.

Many words had a multitude of spellings.

The word “dough,” for instance,