The Complete Guide to English Spelling Rules

CHAPTER 29 Using y, ee, i, ea ie, ey There are seven different ways we can produce the long ee sound at the end of a word. This ...

words in this list are of course Italian. (^) Words containing the double i are extremely rare. (^) Occasionally, some of these ...

regions it is called a cay and pronounced kay, while in still other parts it may be pronounced kway. It is clear that the simple ...

CHAPTER 30 Using u, ue, ew, oo, ou, etc. In English, the oo sound can be spelled in an astonishing number of ways, yet in nearly ...

(^) The ew is not often found in the middle of a word. (^) Spelling rule #4: The oo spelling is usually found in the middle of a ...

(^) In the ieu group, we have a very small group of words that are mostly of French origin: (^) An unusual but very ancient pair ...

CHAPTER 31 Using al, tial, cial, sial Many nouns can be made into adjectives by the addition of the suffix al: (^) Sometimes it ...

CHAPTER 32 Using efy and ify The endings efy and ify are not a difficult problem because there are only three anomalies. The ver ...

CHAPTER 33 Using cede, sede, ceed, seed Although there is only a small handful of commonly used English words that use one of th ...

CHAPTER 34 Using er, or, ar, re, our These five endings should pose no problem. This is because we use only three of them. Two h ...

A censer is for burning incense, but a censor is a person. A quitter is a person who quits, but quittor is a horse disease. Lumb ...

CHAPTER 35 Using y, ry, ary, ery, iry, ory, ury, yry To the student of English, these seven possible endings must seem enormousl ...

(^) There are only a few commonly used words that end in ury. (^) Even fewer commonly used words end in iry: (^) And only two wo ...

CHAPTER 36 Using ly, ally, ely, ily, lly, uly The suffix ly is used to change an adjective into an adverb. There are a half doze ...

CHAPTER 37 Using able and ible The spelling rules governing the suffixes able and ible are quite simple if we bear in mind that ...

(^) The exception is flexible. There seems to be no logical reason for this exception, so let’s just say that English is a flexi ...

CHAPTER 38 Using ous, ious, eous, uous The suffix ous, which means “full of or like,” is used to create adjectives. There are ma ...

—grievous and mischievous (which has only three syllables, not four). Up to this point the spelling rules for the ous words are ...

CHAPTER 39 Using tion, sion, ssion, tian, cian, cion, shion, xion, sian, cean The tion ending, in all its variations, is usually ...

neatly into the spelling rules and how very few are anomalies. ...