'Believe', 'separate' and 'surprise' are some of the most commonly used words in the English language yet they are commonly misspelt. Why is that? What's so difficult about spelling English words that ...

Johnny in Topeka can’t read, but Janne in Helsinki is effortlessly finishing his storybooks. Such a disparity may be expected by now, but the reason might come as a surprise: It probably has much less ...

The longest word in any major English dictionary is 45 letters long! The word is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosisand it is the name of a medical ...

How can it be that “laughter” and “daughter” not only don’t rhyme but don’t sound remotely alike? What about “tomb,” “bomb,” ...

If you're a kid learning how to write, or an adult speaker of a language with sensible spelling, English spelling can seem like a cruel prank. And even if you're a completely literate adult native ...

My 11-year-old student sighs. How can the same letters make so many different sounds? We are looking at the letter combination “ough”, which can be read in seven different ways: “through”, “thorough”, ...

Many people were spellbound as they watched the newest Scripps National Spelling Bee champions — Gokul Venkatachalam and Vanya Shivashankar — correctly sound out scherenschnitte and nunatak in order ...

English, whatever its merits as a language, is a bitch to spell. There are so many rules, and so many exceptions, and yet in the end you have to learn a lot of words on a case-by-case basis. If future ...