Why You Can Never Spell This Word Right
Recently, I saw someone post about how they can’t spell the word ‘rhythm.’
I really relate to this. I don’t have that much trouble with ‘rhythm,’ but I always spell ‘language’ wrong. Usually, it comes out something like ‘langauge’ the first time. This is very troubling, seeing as I’m a linguist! I’m sure everyone has their own spelling nemesis.
GoogleTrends even made a map of the most misspelled words in each state. Whatever the word is that you misspell all the time, it’s probably not as surprising as the fact that the most misspelled word in Wisconsin is “Wisconsin.”
Linguists aren’t the grammar police. There’s nothing wrong with spelling things wrong. But linguists can help to explain why you might be spelling words wrong.
The big reason is that English spelling is a mess. It’s hard. If you’ve studied any other languages, like French or German, you might have noticed that spelling is a little bit easier. Generally, the same letters are used to represent the same sounds.
This isn’t really true in English.
Exhibit A:
“English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.”
Those words all sound different and mean different things, but they are spelled basically the same!
Here’s another one. By the logic of the English writing system you can spell the name of that animal that swims in the ocean “ghoti.” Seriously. Hear me out.
If you take the last sound in “tough”, the first vowel in “women” and the “ti” in nation, you can spell “fish” as “ghoti.”
So if you’ve ever struggled to spell a specific word (or just struggled with spelling generally), you can pretty safely blame English.
So how did we get here?
English has borrowed a lot of words from a lot of languages. According to one source, English has borrowed extensively from these languages: Latin, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Scandinavian, Japanese, Arabic, Portuguese, Sanskrit, Russian, Maori, Hindi, Hebrew, Persian, Malay, Urdu, Irish, Afrikaans, Yiddish, Chinese, Turkish, Norwegian, Zulu, and Swahili. And that’s not even all of them!
Greek isn’t mentioned there, but that’s why “rhythm” is so hard to spell. We don’t have that many words in English that start with “rh”, but this time if comes from Greek. The Greek word for “rhythm” is “rhuthmos.” And then as the word got borrowed into Latin and eventually into French, it became
“rhythme.” Then from there we get the English word.
A lot of the time, when words are borrowed through several languages and go through different iterations, some parts of the spelling stay the same. The “h” in “rhythm” is an artifact of its Greek origin.
Let’s also consider why so many people in Wisconsin have trouble spelling “Wisconsin.” The name for the state comes from the Miami (their autonym, or name for themselves, is Myaamia) word for the Wisconsin River, which was then transliterated into French and then again into English as “Meskonsing”. Eventually, it became “Wisconsin.” No wonder people struggle to spell the name. It’s basically gone through a colonial version of the game Telephone that took place over hundreds of years.
This is kind of the story of English. English will basically take any word that it sees and make it its own. If you look up the etymology of any given word, the likelihood that that word came from Old English alone with no outside influence is kind of low. If you want to try it, I recommend using this website: https://www.etymonline.com/.
This reflects the colonial history of English-speaking people, but it also represents the beauty of English. It’s the melting pot of languages. People from all over the world over many centuries have influenced the way that I talk, which I think is pretty amazing.
Let me know if there’s a word that you have trouble spelling or a word that you have recently found out has a surprising origin.
I’m a Linguist writing about travel, language, and society & culture. If you enjoyed this article you can support me by becoming a member and reading my other work.
