We Need to Talk About Spelling

The other day, I got stuck spelling a word. Seeking to describe an event for which guests required a ticket, I typed out “ticketted” and was immediately confronted by the red squiggly line of error. Was it really ticketed, with only two Ts? That did not look right.

But no: Two-T ticketed is correct. English’s decentralized authorities (for example, dictionaries like Merriam-Webster’s) have certified it. Behind their approval, I see greater, subtler forces at work. In brief, I suggest that written English is silently, gradually, and accidentally becoming a bit more Chinese-like. No, it has nothing to do with emojis.

What furrowed my brow in this case was that ticketed seemed to fly in the face of English’s successful system of "Magic E," whereby a final mute E assists in the sound of the vowel two places to its left—note the difference between van and vane, sit and site, not and note.

"...drifting speech and innovative symbolism are, I posit, making written English today accidentally closer to the venerable system of Chinese writing, with its vast cast of characters."

To counteract the effects of E, English spelling can double its consonants: Hear the U in mute and mutter. My intuition was that ticketted fit the pronunciation best, correctly signaling that ticketed does not rhyme with deleted. I have had the same problem with "developped"; a learner might wrongly rhyme the approved spelling developed with eloped.

Ignoring my protestations, ticketed certainly works because it successfully commits to writing two component parts: ticket and the functional -ed appendage that makes it into a descriptive word. My eyes recognize the two and the word that they form in an instant. I do not need to hear ticketed first to understand it. Speaking strictly of the domain of writing and reading, it makes sense to write ticketed as the combination of two units of information—regardless of how the overall written word corresponds to its spoken counterpart or how it works with sound-based rules like Magic E.

It is efficient, as well as a valid principle of writing, to put meaning and function front and center. We can call this principle “logographic” and such spellings “iconic.” By historical accident, there are iconic words at work in the reading and writing of English already.

A standard spelling for the language began to emerge in fifteenth-century southern England, connected to the arrival of the latest technology from the Continent: the printing press. What sounds were present in the mouths of local speakers were those that made the cut and got written down. But speech marched on.

So many of the quirks of English today—like its infamous silent letters—are products of the lag between altered sounds and unaltered spelling. It is responsible for the GH in light and the K in knee, which were pronounced back in Geoffrey Chaucer’s day but have since fallen silent. English is also today such a broad church that audible letters for some might be mute elsewhere; Brits and Bostonians are generally united in not pronouncing the R in car.

But note that silence does not equal uselessness. Here iconicity creeps in—that is, separate spellings for separate meanings. English’s phonetically outdated orthography nevertheless serves to keep know separate from now, son from sun, knight from night, two from too, sight from site. This is at least a gift to the fluent reader, whose eye and brain speedily compute each word as a whole, not as a sequence of letters representing a sequence of sounds. They also spot know as the meaningful core within other words (known, knowledge, and acknowledge), ignoring the unit’s somewhat varied pronunciation. So too do they tell there, their, and they’re apart with ease.

In English today, the default pluralizer is a final S. We read and enumerate it in dogs, birds, cats, and snakes. Its simplicity in writing unites divergent sounds, however. Since the 1400s, that S has increasingly been affected by its neighbors; it now buzzes at the end of dogs and birds but hisses with cats and snakes. At least the letter stands still.

As sounds split, shift, and slip from our mouths, they fly free of the letters to which at one point they were firmly tethered. But meaning can remain grounded on the page.

Other icons of writing are more intentional. I note the ubiquity nowadays of the Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, 4, and so on). Their acceptance in Europe during the Middle Ages was something else given a boost by the printing press. Today, their victory over their written counterparts (one, two, three, four) seems within reach. I find myself writing 30 or 13th more than I do thirty or thirteenth. Concurrently, my eyes balk at the sight of a date or amount of money spelled out in full words (for example, four hundred and forty-four dollars rather than $444).

The numerals’ simplicity and international intelligibility guarantee such success. They are totally iconic, isolated from any one spoken form. The symbol 3 is vocalized differently across the languages of Europe: It can be tre (Italian), drei (German), or három (Hungarian). We instantly know what a 3 means abroad without the faintest idea of how the locals render it in sound.

A combination of drifting speech and innovative symbolism is, I posit, making written English today accidentally closer to the venerable system of Chinese writing, with its vast cast of characters. These characters represent an incredible diversity of speech. For example, 人 "person" sounds like rén in Beijing, but jan⁴ in Hong Kong. Inversely, 他 "he," 她 "she" and 它 "it" bear their own character, as befits their different functions, but are all pronounced tā in Mandarin Chinese.

A little or a lot of iconicity in writing and reading—along with a loose relationship with sound—is in theory nothing to worry about. Chinese writing, one of the world’s dominant scripts, takes it as a foundational principle.

Nevertheless, words’ meanings are not the historical basis for English writing, nor how elementary English literacy is taught. Caught between sounds and meaning, I salute our teachers, tasked with imparting this multifaceted system to foreign learners and the next generation of native speakers. They have to arm themselves with a conceptual arsenal of phonics and etymology.

Should these teachers "fail," the consequences will be significant. If standard English spelling yielded to a radical recommitment to sounds (for example, see the "Shavian" alphabet, named after playwright and spelling reformer George Bernard Shaw), then suddenly the language’s many national and regional dialects and accents would all demand representation in writing. English, already fragmented in speech, would disintegrate in the visual medium too.

At that point, could we talk of one English language anymore?

Danny Bate is a linguist and writer. After completing a Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh, he has dedicated himself to presenting linguistics to the general public, a vocation recently expressed in his 2025 debut book, Why Q Needs U.