English Spelling Is a Mess. When is Enough…Enuf?

This May, students from across the United States will gather in Washington D.C., for the 100th anniversary of the Scripps Spelling Bee, determined to conquer a spelling system that has baffled us for centuries.

They will arrive with wordlists and flash cards, sticky notes and fidget toys, and multisyllabic monstrosities like staphylococcus committed to memory. At a word, they’ll be able to rattle off Latin roots, Greek suffixes, silent letters, vowel shifts, olden plurals, and other lexical artifacts that seem to exist in English today only to confuse us—in more ways than one.

There’s a reason spelling bees are only common in English-speaking countries: English spelling is absurd. Even the most skilled spellers will admit that English is a mess. In our woeful orthography, choir, and liar rhyme, daughter and laughter don’t, and knickknack has four—count them, four—entirely useless K’s.

So why do we still use it? If our system of writing words is so tragically inconsistent—from the unpronounced B in doubt to the ghostly whisper of an R in colonel—why haven’t we standardized it, phoneticized it, and brought it into line? How many brave linguists have had the courage to state, in a declaration of phonetic revolt, “Enough is enuf”?

Many, in fact. In the quirky chronicles of linguistic history, hundreds of well-meaning “simplified spellers” tried valiantly—and vainly—to tame the wild beast that is English spelling. Benjamin Franklin was one such beast tamer. In his 1768 “Scheme for a New Alphabet and Reformed Mode of Spelling,” he proposed removing six letters from the alphabet—C, J, Q, W, X, and Y—and respelling friend as frend, could as kuld, busy as bizi, and accurate as the intriguingly phonetic akiuret (tu naim a few). These spellings were, apparently, every bit as laughable back then as they are now: When Franklin sent his new alphabet to his friend Mary Stevenson, she dismissed it so firmly that Franklin never spoke of it publicly again.

Lexicographer and writer Noah Webster took a swing at reform two decades later. Long before his Webster’s Dictionary made him a household name, Webster was an orthographic muckraker, dedicated to obliterating silent and superfluous letters. “Thus greef should be substituted for grief,” he wrote in 1789, “[and] kee for key; beleev for believe; laf for laugh; dawter for daughter; plow for plough; tuf for tough; proov for prove; blud for blood; and draft for draught.” For years after, critics would lampoon Webster’s ideas using exaggerated, pseudo-phonetic spellings, referring to him as “No-ur Webstur eskwier junier” and playfully distorting his arguments to paint him as a comical figure. One humorless critic questioned whether someone capable of such spellings should be allowed to “roam abroad, unrestrained by a strait waistcoat.”

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Other reformers came and went. In 1829, an Ohio schoolteacher named James Ruggles proposed a “Universal Language” designed to phoneticize spelling as well as regularize all plurals and verb tenses. He shortened could to cood, which seems logical enough—but he also changed the past tense of know to noed. “I hav noed meni mans hoo cood rite a gooder hand than miself,” Ruggles proudly declared, “but fu can skribed swiftlier.” In 1842, Auguste Thibaudin, a London professor, suggested replacing all vowels with numbers. His translation of the Lord’s Prayer is a sight to behold:

92R F9THƐR H26TSH 9RT 6N H8VN

H9L58D B6 TH96 N7M.

TH96 K6NGDƐM KƐM,

TH96 26L B6 DƐN 6N ƐRTH,

9Z 6T 6Z 6N H8VN.

G6V ƐS TH6S D76 92R D76L7 BR8D.

9MN.

The efforts even extended to Britain’s military, where Major BartłomiejBeniowski, a London officer, launched an 1844 campaign against what he described as English’s “glaring absurdities,” “monomaniacal absurdities,” “stupefying absurdities,” and “oppressing, incubus-like absurdities.” He called his 35-letter alphabet, naturally, the “Anti-Absurd Alphabet” and urged all books to be printed “anti-absurdly.” He dubbed his converts “anti absurdists.”

As spelling reform gained traction in the 19th century, it became entwined with other fringe movements like vegetarianism, homeopathy, and alcohol temperance. Isaac Pitman, inventor of the Pitman shorthand system, dabbled in several of these causes simultaneously, vowing to live a simple life devoid of booze, meat, and silent letters: “I attribiut mei helth and pouer ov endiurans tu abstinens from flesh meat and alkoholik drinks,” he wrote in his invented spelling in 1859. “I kan kum tu no uther konkluzhon when I see the efekt ov such ekstended ourz ov labor on uther men who eat meat and drink wein or beer.”

The peak of the so-called “Simplified Spelling Movement” came in 1906 with the founding of the Simplified Spelling Board in New York City, led by the star-studded team of Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, William James, Henry Holt, U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Brewer, and other intelligentsia dedicated to changing English at an institutional level. Armed with Twain’s literary clout and Carnegie’s funding, the Board circulated a list of 300 recommended spellings (thru, tho, surprize, kist, lookt, fantom, subpena, among others) for adoption in America’s schools and publications. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, always eager to champion a modernizing cause, heeded the call.

“The President, in his correspondence, [will spell] the way you say he ought to!” Roosevelt gleefully informed the Board by letter that summer. That August, he issued an executive order to his Government Printing Office: Henceforth, all public federal documents must be written in simplified, phonetic spelling.

The backlash was swift and merciless. The New York Times dubbed the President a “laughing stock” for trying to force thru and tho upon an innocent public, and The Worcester Evening Gazette declared with an editorial smirk that it will “continue to be printed in the English language, not in ‘Karnegi,’ [or] ‘Ruzvelt’ . . .” The most colorful response came across the pond from London’s Sun:

Mr. Andru Karnegi (or should it be Karnege?) and President Rusvelt (or is it Ruzvelt?) are doing their (or ther) best to ad to the gaiety of nations (or nashuns) by atempting to reform the speling of the English langwidge. No dowt their (or ther) intentions (or intenshuns) are orl rite, but their (or ther) objekt is orl rong, not to say silly (or sily).

For the next three months, newspapers brutally mocked “Ruzevelt Speling” in headlines and political cartoons, poking phonetic fun at the President and his foray into simplification. (In one memorable cartoon, Roosevelt blasts a dictionary to pieces with a revolver. In another, Uncle Sam barricades a schoolhouse door, blocking Roosevelt’s entry.) At the annual Gridiron Dinner that fall, all attendees—including Roosevelt—received a parody “Dikshunary,” filled with terms and definitions inspired by the Roosevelt presidency:

klub. (n) A weppun. Obsoleet sintz the appearance uv the Big Stik.

yawn. (n) A speciez of applauze rezerved in Kongress az a spechul honor for the Prezident’z message only.

executive sesshun. (n) A mith.

By the time Congress overturned Roosevelt’s order that December, the damage had been done. Simplified spelling was now a national joke—the kooky obsession of an overzealous president and his merry band of misspellers. The movement limped along for a while in smaller circles, but its momentum was gone. “Ruzevelt Speling” was the last hurrah for spelling reform in America.

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But is the dream of simplified spelling over? Far from it. The spirit of the movement lives on today in our digital language, where speed and efficiency are of the essence and abridgments like thru and tho are more common than Noah Webster ever imagined when he proposed them in 1789. The reform is happening before our eyes, beneath our fingers, one keystroke at a time. “Al languajs chanje in th corse of time,” wrote the spelling reformer Christopher Upward, and the changes that appear radical to one generation might seem inevitable to the next. The arc of language bends toward simplicity. LOL is now in Webster’s Dictionary.

Maybe one day, simplified spelling will become the formalized standard. Silent letters will fade, and the old spellings will go the way of Roman numerals. National spelling bees will be regarded as outdated pageantry, relics of a primitive age, as quaint and silly as debutante balls. And then, maybe, enough will finally be enuf.