Spelling Trivia Quiz

Answer: All of these words are spelled correctly

Unfortunately, the English language contains so many apparent exceptions to this rule that some people argue that the rule isn't very helpful. The rule doesn't apply when the vowel is sounded as 'a', as in 'neighbour' or 'weigh', or when sounded as 'i', as in 'height'. It is sometimes thought that the rule only applies to words with a long 'ee' sound, but there are exceptions to this modified rule, like 'seize', 'leisure', 'protein', 'caffeine' and 'species'. It doesn't end there. The rule also doesn't apply to plurals, comparatives and superlatives (and other inflections) of words ending in 'cy', like 'policies' and 'fancier'. It also doesn't apply when the 'c' sounds as 'sh', as in 'glacier', 'ancient' and 'deficient', or in the case of compound words, like 'albeit'. The rule is also inapplicable to most proper nouns (like the names 'Keith', 'Neil' and 'Sheila'), and to various other random exceptions, like 'weird'.

In June 2009, the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families created some controversy when it advised that the "I before E" rule admits so many exceptions that it is "not worth teaching". Instead, the recommendation was that because there are relatively few words where the 'ei' sequence follows the letter 'c', it is much easier to just learn and remember those particular words. The most common examples are 'receive', 'conceive', 'deceive', 'perceive' (and their derivatives) and 'ceiling'.

Answer: y

The letter Thorn (Þ) represented the 'th' sound in Old and Middle English, but it presented a problem when printing was first introduced to England in the 15th century. The letter Thorn had no counterpart in the French and German alphabets, and many of the printers' type fonts in use in England at the time (and, indeed, many of the typesetters themselves) were imported from these countries, so they didn't have the letter in their stock of type.

As the story goes, printers began to substitute the digraph 'th' for the letter Thorn, but because the lowercase Thorn (þ) was sometimes indistinguishable from the handwritten lowercase letter 'y', some printers mistakenly substituted 'y' instead.

In this way, the letter Thorn remained a figurative thorn in the side of the English language, as it persisted up to the 18th century in such usages as 'ye' for 'the', as in 'Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe'.

Answer: b

The word 'doubt' was originally spelled 'dout', and was derived from the French word 'douter'. However, sometime in the late 15th or early 16th century, a 'b' was inserted into the word to indicate its connection to the Latin word 'dubitare'. Similarly, the word 'debt' was originally spelled 'det' or 'dette' (following the spelling from Old French), but over time writers and scholars began spelling it with a 'b' to indicate its origins to the Latin word 'debitum'. Only the spellings of these words were changed but not the pronunciations, so these insertions were silent.

The same phenomenon can be observed in the insertion of the letter 's' in the spelling of 'island', which was an attempt to create a connection to the French word 'isle' and the Latin word 'insula', even though the word really came from the Middle English word 'iland', which in turn derived from the Norse word 'igland'.

Answer: indict

To 'indict' someone is to formally charge them as having committed a crime or wrongdoing. The word was originally 'enditen', but a 'c' was inserted so that the word would follow the spelling of the Vulgar Latin 'indictare' more closely. The insertion did not change the pronunciation of the word, however, so while the 'c' is pronounced in the 'dict' sequence of letters found in words like 'dictate', 'predict' and 'contradict', it is silent in 'indict'.

Apart from indicating the origins of words, silent letters can also serve to indicate the pronunciation of other letters in a word. Witness how adding a silent 'e' to the end of 'hat' changes the pronunciation of the vowel sound in 'hate'. Not all silent letters started their lives out as silent, though. For instance, the 'k' in words like 'know', 'knit' and 'knight' used to be pronounced, just like the 'b' in words like 'lamb', 'bomb' and 'thumb', but the 'k' and 'b' in these words became silent over time.

Answer: ough

The sequence 'augh' is sounded differently depending on the word in which it appears, such as the different pronunciations of 'laughter' and 'slaughter'. The 'omb' sequence is capable of at least three different pronunciations, as can be seen in words like 'comb', 'bomb' and 'tomb'. The 'ear' sequence of letters gives rise to even more unique variations, as evidenced by words like 'hear', 'bear', 'learn' and 'heart'. But none of these sequences of letters can even approach the variety of sounds attributable to 'ough', which supports at least nine different pronunciations in the English language:

The word 'though' is pronounced to rhyme with 'toe'; 'tough' rhymes with 'cuff'; 'cough' rhymes with 'off'; 'plough' rhymes with 'cow'; while 'bought' rhymes with 'caught'. At the same time, 'through' rhymes with 'threw'; 'hough' is pronounced 'hock'; 'lough' is pronounced 'loch'; and 'hiccough' is pronounced 'hiccup'.

Answer: X

Abbreviations are often made up of letters taken from the word being abbreviated. For example, the word 'Boulevard' is often spelled 'Blvd' on street signs. In some cases, however, an abbreviation can consist of letters that are not found in the word being abbreviated. One well-known example is the unit of mass known as the pound, which is abbreviated to 'lb', from the Latin word 'libra', the ancient Roman unit of measurement from which the pound derives.

Another familiar example is the abbreviation of 'Christmas' as 'Xmas', a practice which has sparked a fair bit of controversy. Some people view it as a heinous attempt to secularise Christmas, by literally taking the 'Christ' out of 'Christmas', while others are quick to point out that the 'X' in 'Xmas' has more to do with Christ than meets the eye. The 'X' is actually derived from the Greek letter Chi (Χ, χ), which is the first letter in 'Christós' (Χριστός), the Greek word for 'Christ'. In fact, the symbol 'X' has been used as a Christogram (a symbol for Christ) since at least the 15th century. Still, many prefer to disregard the abbreviation and write out 'Christmas' in full, as a reminder of the true meaning of the holiday.

Answer: intentionally incorrect spelling

There are various possible reasons why spelling errors would be deliberately introduced into the name of a product or brand. Trademark laws commonly disallow the registration of marks which are merely descriptive, so an intentionally misspelled product name could allow for the protection of what may otherwise be an invalid trademark. Deliberately misspelled names have also been known to help businesses avoid legal liability, whether in the form of food labelling legislation, or otherwise. Kellogg USA has successfully defended various lawsuits brought by irate consumers who claimed that they were misled into thinking that their Froot Loops cereal contained actual fruit.

The claims were dismissed in part because the court found that the food giant was not holding out its cereal as containing real fruit. (Luckily for Kellogg's, the court was not required to determine what, if anything, constituted 'froot'.) Deliberate misspellings can also serve to distinguish one's brand in the mind of the public, or to lend some irony or double meaning to an otherwise ordinary name. Case in point: The Beatles is an intentional, musically appropriate misspelling of what would otherwise be an order of insect.

Answer: u

There are many examples of words in the English language that were originally spelled with a 'u' in the Old or Middle English periods, but which were revised over time to be spelled with the letter 'o' instead.

One theory for this change is that it stemmed from the need to make these words easier to read. The prevailing style of manuscript writing during this period entailed some letters (among them 'i', 'u', 'n', 'm', 'w' and 'v') being written in a combination of short downstrokes known as 'minims'. The problem arose when these letters appeared next to each other in a word, giving rise to a "forest of lines" that made it difficult for readers to tell where one letter ended and the other began. The substitution of an 'o' for a 'u' therefore arose out of a need to break up these minim clusters, so that readers could discern the vowels from the consonants in words that featured two or more minim letters grouped together. This is apparently the same reason a diacritic dot (known as a 'tittle') appears over the lowercase 'i' and 'j' in manuscript writing - to distinguish these letters from their neighbours.

Answer: homophones

Homophones can be spelled the same, like the word 'bark', which can refer to the sound a dog makes, or the outside covering of a tree or other woody plant. More often, homophone pairs or sets are spelled differently, such as 'write', 'rite', 'right' and 'wright', or 'raise', 'rays' and 'raze', which are pronounced the same but have distinct spellings and meanings. Homophone confusion can give rise to inadvertently humorous situations, like the story of the schoolchild who once submitted an essay about Eugene O'Neill, the 1957 winner of a 'Pullet Surprise'. Even professional writers need to take care to avoid the dangers of homophone confusion. The 1977 edition of "The United Press International Stylebook", a popular style and usage guide for writers and editors, contained the following advisory on the importance of distinguishing homophones:

"A 'burro' is an ass. A 'burrow' is a hole in the ground. As a journalist you are expected to know the difference."

Answer: fish

According to some, 'ghoti' can be a legitimate respelling of the word 'fish', if the letters take on the pronunciations in these words: 'gh' from 'laugh'; 'o' from 'women'; and 'ti' from 'nation'. However, critics are quick to point out that the suggested pronunciation of 'ghoti' is fallacious at best, since the digraph 'gh' is never used to represent an 'f' sound at the start of a word, just as 'ti' is never used to represent the 'sh' sound at the end of a word.

'Ghoti' is often attributed to playwright George Bernard Shaw, himself a well-known advocate of English spelling reform, but scholars and even Shaw's own biographers have been unable to find any evidence that Shaw was responsible for the Frankensteinian creation. It remains an amusing demonstration of the bizarre nature of the English language. Interesting fact: In the constructed Klingon language for the "Star Trek" universe, the Klingon word for 'fish' is actually 'ghoti'.