'Take care that you never spell a word wrong," wrote Thomas Jefferson to his daughter Martha in 1783. "It produces great praise to a lady to spell well." Jefferson made a command of spelling sound as if it were a genteel accomplishment, akin to being able to embroider a handkerchief. But his sentiments are broadly familiar, and we all know of people who have suffered for their misspellings, from Dan Quayle with his insistence on "potatoe" to the mason who made two errors inscribing the name Julia Louis-Dreyfus on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (click below to read more)
In "Spell It Out," an authoritative yet accessible history of English spelling, David Crystal takes a jaunty view of a subject often mired in pedantic dullness: "Anyone who dares to treat spelling as an adventure will find the journey rewarding. . . . Approached in the right way, spelling can be fun." It is a statement typical of this most populist of professors, who holds an honorary chair at the University of Bangor, Wales. A prolific commentator on all aspects of language, Mr. Crystal is a well-informed guide. He has no time for the conventional line that English spelling is chaotic. Instead he emphasizes that its peculiarities are explicable. That isn't to say that they are simple, but he shows that, with a little historical digging, one can make sense of them.
His method is chronological, so he begins with the English writing system that developed in the seventh century. Missionaries arrived in Britain and found people speaking various dialects of a Germanic language. Some of these people were literate, but their writing system—runes, like those used by the Dwarves in "The Hobbit"—had pagan associations. To dispel the vapors of magic and spread Christianity, the incomers felt compelled to establish a new medium for written communication: the Roman alphabet, with its 23 letters.
Twenty-three? Yes, because there was no j or w, and there was no distinction between u and v. These resources were inadequate to represent the sounds of the language. It's no different with the modern alphabet of 26 letters, which has to represent 40 or more phonemes, the language's smallest sound units.
Mr. Crystal does a good job of explaining the developments that followed the introduction of the Roman alphabet, confidently elucidating large shifts in practice. But the main strength of his writing is an ability to zero in on a telling detail. For instance, he notes that scribes in the Middle Ages wrote words as they were pronounced. The variety of regional accents meant that some words were spelled in many different ways. The word night had 60 spellings—some simple (niht, nite) and others more forbidding (nyghtt, nhyht). For a scribe being paid by the inch, the more cumbrous forms had their attractions.
No account of English spelling can overlook the influence of William Caxton, who introduced printing to England in 1476. The author shows that Caxton's pragmatic approach had some unintended effects. Caxton brought in experienced compositors from Bruges. They spoke Flemish, and their knowledge of English was less than perfect. They spelled English words in ways that felt right to them, resulting in an English that had a distinctly Flemish hue. This is why we find anh in ghost: In Flemish the word was gheest. The h spread to related words, such asaghast and ghastly. But in other cases the Flemish tinge didn't last: In Caxton's texts there is an h in goat and goose.
Later, etymology played a part in spelling reform. Mr. Crystal paraphrases the Renaissance attitude: "If a word comes ultimately from Latin, let's see if there's anything in the Latin spelling that would help fix it in the English mind." This is why there is a b in debt and a p in receipt. A knowledge of Latin helps with other English spellings. If you know that supercilium was the Latin for "eyebrow," you will spellsupercilious with a c rather than an s at its heart. Admirable ends "-able" because it derives from the Latin admirare; audible ends "-ible" because it comes from audire.
To a large degree, Mr. Crystal's narrative is a history of individuals taking charge of matters. In the age of Shakespeare there was hostility to the letter z. The educationalist Richard Mulcaster thought that it looked alien and was "cumbersome to the hand in penning." He increased his contemporaries' antagonism to what is described by a character in "King Lear" as "an unnecessary letter."
In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson drew a distinction between travel and travail, two words that had been used interchangeably until then. Less compellingly, he insisted that the letter c should never end a word: One should write of matters beingpolitick or pathetick. It is to a critic of Johnson, Noah Webster, that we owe the American preference for favor and ax—as opposed to the British favour and axe—though quite a few of his other recommendations, such as tung and fether, didn't succeed.
Among later reformers, the most committed was George Bernard Shaw. Mr. Crystal mentions Shaw only briefly and writes that "the radical arguments presented by spelling reformers have never persuaded." Yet he shares their assertiveness and concludes with some thoughts on how English spelling should be taught. Here again he is both a firm guide and a sane one, as he argues that spelling is a skill separate from reading and writing—and therefore in need of separate attention in the classroom. "Spell It Out" energetically shows that the experience of paying such attention needn't be dreary.
Mr. Hitchings is the author of "The Language Wars: A History of Proper English" and "Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary."
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