Henry is the author of Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell Detroit News, December 1906. Roosevelt sits stunned in a boxing ring after losing his match with the ...

There isn't a strong link between good spelling and intelligence, but that doesn't mean spelling doesn't matter. Proper spelling makes people perceive you as more intelligent and can increase your ...

Jill Kitson: Welcome to Lingua Franca. This week: revelling in the richness of English spelling. Robert Dessaix examines the case against spelling reform. Robert Dessaix: Not long ago in Melbourne, at ...

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”, ...

Take a look at the following English words: butcher, squirrel, mortgage, and choir. Does something seem off about them? At one point in time, the words move and love rhymed. So did blood, good, and ...

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 ...

This post is in partnership with History Today. The article below was originally published at HistoryToday.com. Note: Usually, History Today posts appear on TIME.com with American spellings. For this ...