The Complete Guide to English Spelling Rules

program, all of which are now fully accepted.
The spelling reform movement received enthusiastic support from numerous prestigious organizations.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Education Association, and the
Modern Language Association all supported reform and the powerful Chicago Tribune likewise threw its
weight behind the campaign.
The movement soon caught the attention of Theodore Roosevelt, who was a friend of Andrew
Carnegie. With his usual energy, Roosevelt leapt right in. He used many of the “reformed” words in his
election campaign and, it is claimed, was the first to use thru instead of through. Cannily waiting until
congress was safely out of session, the president gave a list of three hundred words to the government
printers and ordered them to use only those spellings. There was an immediate uproar and, as soon as
congress reconvened, the printers were ordered to go back to the original spellings.
As early as 1886, the reformers had begun to compile a list of amended spellings. Starting cautiously
with only one dozen “crucial” words that included tho, altho, thoro, thorofare, thru, and thruout, they
quickly compiled even longer lists so that within a very short while the list of amended spellings was
about 3,600 words long. In 1898, the National Education Association gave its approval to the twelve
crucial words. The Modern Language Association had done so five years earlier.
After the initial burst of enthusiasm, there followed years of hard work. Lists were compiled,
committees were formed, experts argued endlessly, and a steady stream of letters and bulletins were sent
out. The reformers worked hard to persuade publishers and editors of dictionaries to adopt the reformed
spellings and The Century Dictionary was persuaded to add the new words as an appendix with an
introduction, while the Standard Dictionary of the English Language (1893) incorporated all the
amended spellings into its listings.
In 1915, there appeared A Dictionary of Simplified Spelling from the New Standard Dictionary of the
English Language; and Based on the United States Bureau of Education and the Rules of the American
Philological Association and the Simplified Spelling Board. It was hoped that this, along with other
smaller dictionaries and word lists that had been previously published, would forever reform English
spelling.
However, Andrew Carnegie died and with his death, the essential funding dried up. Oral support alone
could not pay the bills and the Spelling Reform Association, under its able secretary Melvil Dewey,
could not find another generous sponsor. The lack of support can, perhaps, be traced to the fact that
Dewey was openly anti-Semitic and had made many enemies in the business community.
Some smaller groups tried valiantly to carry on the struggle, but more important international matters
filled the newspapers. A new generation of professors appeared in the universities, and the publishers
and editors began to look upon spelling reform as a lost cause. In England the Simplified Spelling
Society, which was founded in 1908, still keeps the flag flying bravely, but it is essentially ignored, while
in the United States, largest of the English speaking countries, spelling reform is rarely if ever discussed.
Unfortunately, the failure of the reform movement brought about a reaction. Beginning in the late 1930s,
various self-proclaimed experts in the field of education declared spelling to be unimportant. By the
1960s, most school report cards no longer gave a grade for spelling. Teachers were told not to “waste
time” teaching correct spelling, and the spelling bee and other spelling competitions were dropped from
most school programs. Their place was taken by “sight reading” and “creative spelling” along with a
serious but misguided reliance on phonics, with the tragic result that a whole generation of adults,
including teachers, has grown up to believe the myth that English spelling has no rules and that trying to
understand English spelling is therefore a waste of time.
Was spelling reform a wasted effort? The question begs to be asked. Most of the great names in
academia on both sides of the Atlantic, supported by numerous respected societies and organizations, put
long years of hard work into something that they truly believed was worthwhile. The movement received