May 6, 2011 · This means that spelling is only a part of orthography (spelling is part of a writing system), but orthography includes a lot more than just spelling. That is where the difference between …

Jan 21, 2023 · The old english letter Æ/æ in various words have been modernised to either A (Æthelstan to Athelstan); E (Ælf to Elf, Æthelræd to Ethelred) and sometimes both A and E in the same word …

Aug 23, 2014 · Our numbers have a specific two-letter combination that tells us how the number sounds. For example 9th 3rd 301st What do we call these special sounds?

I was at a museum in London yesterday, and one of the items on exhibit is a document from the eighteenth century. It uses the letter f a lot where s should be used—for example, in Majefty. Did the

Jul 23, 2024 · In The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova by Judith Hemschemeyer, we read: In this everyday gray dress, On rundown heels... I thought that "rundown" was a substantive and …

Jun 30, 2017 · This isn't strictly about the pronunciation of phonemes, all the phonemes in /fɪʃ/ are being pronounced as usual, rather this has to do with an incorrect application of the rules linking …

Dec 22, 2025 · Q&A for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts

I don't know of any useful rule for when O is pronounced as /ʌ/. There aren't that many words where O in a stressed syllable is pronounced as /ʌ/, so I think it's most practical to just memorize the …

Mar 24, 2020 · I have seen it spelled COVID-19, but I have also seen Covid-19. In addition, I believe I have seen CoViD-19, capitalising only the first letter of each word from which it was abbreviated (for …

Oct 13, 2020 · @TRiG — From what I can see looking at various online sources, "dieresis" & "umlaut" can refer to the linguistic phenomena, as well as the diacritic mark used in its particular context. …