This May, students from across the United States will gather in Washington D.C., for the 100th anniversary of the Scripps Spelling Bee, determined to conquer a spelling system that has baffled us for ...

You are forgiven, dear reader, if your initial reaction to the headline is, ‘There are rules?’ Ah, but there are — not quite like the rules of bridge or football or the US Senate, but generalisations ...

Sometimes words just have to be spelled for others. I’ve been on phone conversations where the person on the other end is spelling for me and it’s painful. “Was that a ‘b’ or a ‘p’?” Sometimes they’ll ...

The way most of us learn to spell in English makes little sense. If you, like many of us, were taught in the traditional way that "one letter makes one sound", think ...