The Complete Guide to English Spelling Rules

Spelling rule #2: An open syllable occurs when the vowel is not followed by a consonant. In most cases the vowel will then be lo ...

CHAPTER 2 Vowels Traditionally, there are five vowels in English, but in practice we have six: a, e, i, o, u, and y. The letter ...

CHAPTER 3 Vowel Plus r In English spelling, some consonants change the sound of the vowel that precedes them without using the s ...

CHAPTER 4 The Apostrophe English is an extremely flexible language and has a number of advantages over most other languages. One ...

CHAPTER 5 Contractions Contractions are as simple as they are useful. The apostrophe takes the place of a missing letter (or let ...

CHAPTER 6 The Silent e One extremely useful feature of English spelling is the silent e. We place it at the end of a word in ord ...

(^) Many problems can be traced to an understandable impulse to retain the silent e in order to protect the preceding vowel. Whe ...

CHAPTER 7 The Letter v The letter v may appear anywhere in a word except at the end. No commonly used English word ever ends in ...

CHAPTER 8 Comparatives and Superlatives The comparative words are not a major spelling problem. The only difficulty that student ...

There are no others. It cannot be more unique or less unique or even most unique. Either it is unique, or it is not. ...

CHAPTER 9 Plurals Forming the plural in English is usually just a matter of adding an s. The interesting part of this rule is th ...

spelling, but today, the preferred spelling is the simple s: (^) Note that if the word is an abbreviation, we simply add an s: ( ...

Note that the plural of staff is staffs or staves, depending on the meaning. ...

CHAPTER 10 The Past Tense At one time or another, every teacher on playground duty has been confronted by a small child complain ...

Similarly, the word clapt has given way to clapped. In card games, especially poker, the word dealed is often used instead of de ...

CHAPTER 11 Prefixes and Suffixes The number of suffixes and prefixes (together called affixes) in the English language is truly ...

CHAPTER 12 Single or Double l There are a number of prefixes and suffixes that contain a double l. For example: (^) Finally, ple ...

(^) While the rule is followed in British dictionaries, there are some American dictionaries that offer a choice of skillful or ...

CHAPTER 13 Double the Consonant One of the most irritating problems in English spelling is when to double the consonant and when ...

(^) Occasionally there will be an accent shift when a suffix is added to a word. In these cases, the spelling rule must be follo ...