Lecture 2: The Spelling-Meaning Connection
by vocabulary researcher Shane Templeton. Think of morphology
as the umbrella term here, and the spelling-meaning connection as
an important tool we can use to decode that system. The spelling-
meaning connection also shows us that our spelling system makes
more sense than you may think.z Consider, for example, the word health, which is spelled with a
silent a. Notice that if we remove the last two letters of health—
th—we get heal. That silent a gives us a visual clue to the fact that
health is directly related in meaning to heal, healer, and so on. Thus,
the spelling-meaning connection states: “Words that are related in
spelling are often related in meaning, despite changes in sound.”z There are many other word pairs that illustrate the spelling-meaning
connection in English, such as column/columnist, hymn/hymnal,
and crumb/crumble. The spelling-meaning connection biases us
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words in these pairs, pointing us to the related second words.z Another example of a similar word pair is resign/resignation. A
number of other words are related in spelling and meaning to resign,
including sign, insignia, design, signal, VLJQL¿FDQW, and others. All
these words are derived from the Latin root signum, which means
“a symbol or mark.” They all share a common core meaning related
to a common spelling.z When we use the morphological approach to learning words, we
can begin to see why the great linguist Noam Chomsky said that
the conventional English spelling system is “a near optimal system
for the lexical representation of English words.” Many critics of
our spelling system don’t understand that the system evolved to
represent both sound and meaning. For this reason, knowing a little
about spelling can actually improve your vocabulary knowledge.Analyzing fac Words
z To further illustrate the spelling-meaning connection, let’s return
to the word factotum. As you recall, we divided factotum into two