Spell it Out

The Singular Story of English Spelling

David Crystal 2012

E-Book: 251 English Pages

Price: 1000 Toman

Download: Spell it Out: The Singular Story of English Spelling (Crystal 2012).

I have wanted to write a book on English spelling all my life, but the prospect has always scared me. There is simply so much of it. With well over a million words in English, affected in myriad ways by some 1,300 years of history, the task of attempting to find some order in the chaos, as linguists like to do, seemed well nigh impossible. In 2005 I compiled a Pocket Spelling Dictionary for Penguin Books, and that reinforced my feeling about the vast scale of any such enterprise.
What has changed is that sophisticated tools to help carry out this task have now become available. Chief among these is the online Oxford English Dictionary, which makes it possible to see the spelling history of any word at the click of a mouse. And two huge item-by-item surveys have taken place – the first by Edward Carney, published in 1994 as A Survey of English Spelling; the second by Christopher Upward, published in 2011 in association with George Davidson as A History of English Spelling. It was my privilege to edit the latter book as part of the Blackwell/Wiley Language Library, and it was in the course of this exercise that I began to realise that most of the required hard linguistic graft – the collection and arrangement of copious examples, letter by letter, period by period – had been done.