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 ...

Back in grade school, words like "onomatopoeia" and "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" seemed insanely complicated and long. Surprisingly, neither of these is the ...

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 ...

Some of the brightest young minds just finished showcasing their knowledge of the English language. The 2025 Scripps National Spelling Bee wrapped up this week with participants navigating words the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

One of the best things going on around 200 B.C.E. (from this linguist’s point of view, at least) was that a librarian in Alexandria, Aristophanes of Byzantium, invented the first punctuation system ...

English spelling is crazy. Even people born and raised in English-speaking societies who speak no other language still often have a lot of trouble with English spelling. You may think that English is ...

“The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.” So goes the old chestnut commonly attributed to playwright George Bernard Shaw. One of those separations is in ...

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 ...

English is a quirky, often confusing language that's been shaped and influenced by many others. As such, it has a massive variety of words—but here are some we think rise above the crowd and deserve ...