When enough is “enuf”: The strange and futile history of English spelling reform

In Dիulɥi 1768, Bendիɥmɥn Frɑŋklin sent ɥ most ɥniuzիuɥl letɥr. Nɋu, Frɑŋklin uɋz ɑn ɑvid trikstɥr ɥnd no streendիɥr tu pɥkiuliɥr missives. Az ɥ tiim, hii sɥbmitɥd ɥ dɥzɥn letɥrz tu hiz brɥђɥr’es nuzpeepɥr ɥndɥr ђɥ gɥiz ɥv ɥ midɥl-eedիd uido, ɥnd hii iivin sent ɥ letɥr tu ђɥ Rɋɥiɥl ɥkɑdɥmi ɥv Brɥsɥlz dիokiŋli rikuestiŋ ђee risɥrtի hɋu tu maak faarts smel betɥr. Uɥt uɋz ɋd ɥbɋut ђis letɥr uɋz nɋt ђɥ kɋntent, bɥt ђɥ rɥitiŋ. Frɑŋklin hɑd pend ђɥ letɥr in hiz vɥrzիɥn ɥv simplɥfɥid speliŋ.

How much of that made sense to you? On a first pass, you probably picked out a few words. Those capital letters may have clued you into the names Franklin and Brussels. You may have discerned content and first by sounding the letters you recognized (“kɋntent” and “fɥrst”). You may even have spied a pattern in those frequent, functional words, such as his (“hiz”) and the (“ђɥ”). But without intense effort, any meaning was hidden behind cryptographic mush.

The passage is written in a phonetic alphabet designed by Benjamin Franklin. The American intellect created the spelling system to — if you can believe it — make English spelling more straightforward and sensible. He eliminated those ever-troublesome C’s, J’s, Q’s, W’s, X’s, and Y’s. He doubled up any letter representing a long vowel sound, and he fashioned new letters to represent digraphs (those individual sounds represented by two successive letters, such as the SH in ship).

Franklin tested his system in a letter to Mary “Polly” Stevenson, his landlady’s daughter. Her response was less than enthusiastic. Using his own phonetic alphabet in her reply, Stevenson gently critiqued the “meni inkɥnviiniɥnsiz” and “difɥkɥltiz” of writing in it. Thus ended the first American attempt to revise English spelling.

Gabe Henry opens his latest book, Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Eezier to Spell, with this story because Franklin’s attempt was far from the last. In the 250 years since that indecipherable dispatch, movements to reform and simplify English spelling have cropped up again and again.

When I spoke with Henry about his book, the first question I had to ask him was why he chose this subject. After all, a quick glance through the dictionary, or any book written in English, would suggest these movements, by and large, failed. Why spend years of your life researching the history of efforts that ultimately came to naught — and not, well, naut?

“On first appearance, it’s silly. Aesthetically, visually, simplified spelling is quite silly,” he told me during our conversation. “This idea that people were walking around in revolutionary times with their powdered wigs and spelling laugh ‘L-A-F’ and love ‘L-U-V’ like some GenZ teenager with a smartphone. It was just absurd to me.”

But as we dove deeper into his “biography of futility,” I began to appreciate the movement’s rich and complex history. It is full of sometimes brilliant, often eccentric, yet ultimately well-intentioned people. And though few are aware of this history, it teaches some important lessons about the nature of language, the technologies we’ve created to capture it, and the passion people hold for how they chose to share their voices with others across time.

A short history of wyrd spellings

Anyone who learned to write English in kindergarten, picked up the language later in life, or simply has a passing acquaintance with it through product labels and airport terminal signs can agree to this fact: English spelling makes no damn sense.

How is it that tomb rhymes with groom but not comb? Why would the digraph GH sound like a G in ghost and an F in tough, but be conspicuously silent in high? Speaking of silence, why is the language littered with silent Es at the end of words but then quietly welds P’s, K’s, and G’s to the front of some words seemingly at random?

Such an ungainly orthography must be the fancy of some mad monarch in Britain’s history, right? Nope, said Henry when I asked him. English is the King’s, to be sure. But it also belongs to whole lineages of cardinals, warriors, scribes, typesetters, readers, and cultures that called Great Britain home at one point or another.

The Anglo-Saxons officially brought Old English to the island in the 5th century A.D. While Latin had a foothold in the land long before, courtesy of earlier Roman occupations, it wouldn’t seriously begin influencing English until Anglo-Saxon kings began converting to Christianity in the 600s. The Vikings brought Old Norse with their invasions and subsequent settlements, and the Normans introduced French to the British nobility as a lovely conquering gift after the conquest of 1066.

“Over a thousand-plus years, (the island) exchanged hands and languages and culture. All of that merging turned into what we know as English,” Henry says. For example, today’s English hosts silent letters from Greek (the P in psalm), Old Norse (the K in knife), and a few Latin-French mix-ups (the B in debt). “If all our silent letters came from one place, it might be more consistent for us to teach children. But because it has so many linguistic influences, there’s no consistent rule or pattern you can teach to someone (for) every case and scenario.”

Further complicating matters was the arrival of the printing press. William Caxton introduced the technology to England in 1476, a time when European writing systems were wildly inconsistent. Lacking authoritative reference books, printing houses adopted their own styles and preferences based on things like what made setting the type plates easier or which spellings satisfied their fussy aunts. For instance, people, a French loanword, may be spelled peple, pepill, poeple, or poepul.

At the same time, English was in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift, a change in how English speakers pronounced words (primarily the vowels, but also some consonants). Because the Shift occurred gradually over centuries, it went mostly unnoticed, so printing houses didn’t adjust their styles to match the change, and pronunciations continued to drift further and further from their various spellings.

And that’s the (very short) history of English spelling. It was not shepherded by some grand academy or ruined through the mad ravings of an all-powerful king. Even the fussiest of aunts had little control over it. Instead, it was, as Henry puts it, “the sum total of many accidents over long periods of time.”

National spelling screed

Not that English speakers took all this spelling nonsense lying down. In his book, Henry recounts spelling reform efforts dating as far back as the 15th century. But it wasn’t until the late 18th century that spelling reform really took off. With the publication of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), an authoritative reference existed for how words should — and perhaps more importantly, should not — be spelled. Just as suddenly, there were strong opinions to the contrary.

After Franklin, the next major American figure to pursue reform was Noah Webster, a man whose name is synonymous with the concepts of dictionary and proper spelling. Before that, though, Webster earned his financial success with his “Blue-Backed Speller” (1783), a primer that taught entire generations of American children to read, write, and spell. 

The Speller used traditional British spellings for the time, but as Webster’s patriotism grew in those heady post-Revolution days, he began to view British English as yet another cultural shackle constraining the great American experiment. Spelling reform, he reckoned, would further free the United States from British influence and boost the fledgling nation’s solidarity and sense of identity.

Webster introduced his proposal in “An Essay on a Reformed Mode of Spelling” (1789). He argued for cleaner American spellings so simple that any child or non-native speaker “would learn to spell, without trouble, in a very short time” with orthography that is “very regular.” His amendments included replacing grief for greef, daughter for dawter, and — the one that gifted Henry his title — enough for enuf.

The reaction to Webster’s not-so-modest proposal? “Pure mockery and derision,” Henry says. 

Critics hated the idea and wrote scathing reviews. Unfortunately for Webster, he had risked his reputation and most of his money self-publishing the project. Indebted and a literary laughingstock, he was reduced to “begging his in-laws for loans and local schoolmasters for jobs.” He wouldn’t bounce back until the publication of his seminal dictionary in 1828.

Henry’s book then chronicles 200 more years of attempted spelling reforms. Some came from the fringes, others from the very top of the social ladder. Wherever the efforts happened, two themes tie Henry’s biography of futility together.

The first is social change. Many of the stories Henry tells start with an earnest desire to improve society and the belief that spelling reform was the way forward. These reformers included 19th-century Mormons creating a “Deseret Alphabet” to build a shared identity; abolitionists hoping that a phonetic spelling system would help freed slaves to participate more equally in society; and entrepreneurs and educators who saw simplified spelling as the key to unlocking untapped productivity in workers.

Perhaps the most impressive effort came from Andrew Carnegie. In 1906, the American philanthropist funded the Simplified Spelling Board. The organization boasted, to borrow Henry’s phrase,  a “who’s who of American intelligentsia.” On its board sat William James, Mark Twain, Melvil Dewey, Henry Holt, and the presidents of several prominent universities. President Theodore Roosevelt even supported the plan and issued an executive order that official White House communications be written in reformed spelling.

The result of all this money and influence? The same as the other efforts. Carnegie and Roosevelt fell prey to the second theme threaded through this history: They failed.

“(Roosevelt) brought the movement into the highest offices of the land,” Henry says. “It became a national conversation, even though it was more of a national joke.”

The writing hits the walls

During our conversation, I asked Henry why that was. If everyone agrees English spelling is weird and reformers could at times enjoy the support of incredibly influential people, then why did these efforts continue to fail? His answer is that these movements continued to run into three impenetrable walls.

The first wall is the very thing that initially drew Henry to simplified spelling: It looks silly.

“Simplified spelling always looks like a child wrote it because we associate phonetic spelling with the attempts and trials of (learners) trying to sound things out before they can photographically memorize certain words,” Henry says. “The mockery that met the movement at every turn came about because it was such a childish and silly-looking thing.”

Next comes impractically. Reading fluency is based on our ability to quickly identify words and patterns. Even if a written word doesn’t match its pronunciation perfectly, or barely at all (looking at you colonel), we come to strongly associate the spelling with the sound through a lifetime of repetition. Replacing one spelling for another would be jarring and mentally taxing, as most readers probably felt when trying to parse the opening passage. And at a certain age, even if someone improved through strenuous, prolonged practice, they would always feel like they were translating their native language rather than communicating through it. 

“You’d be perpetually caught in two worlds,” Henry says. “The world of the language that’s second nature to you and the world of the language that people are trying to impose on you. It’s that friction, that tension, that makes it impractical.”

Finally, as ever, stands the wall of tradition. English spelling may not be rational, but it embodies the rich history Henry outlined at the start of our conversation. Spelling physics F-Y-Z-E-E-K-S may be phonetically pure, but it would mask the word’s Greek origins (the PH being an evolution of the Greek letter Phi). Similarly, laugh ending in an F sounds makes no sense, but it helps chart the history of the language’s seismic Teutonic shifts. For many writers and word lovers — the very people any spelling reformer needs to convince — there’s a hand-me-down charm to these marks of distinction.

“Just look at our national spelling bee,” Henry points out. “There’s a whole glorification of complicated words. People pride themselves on mastering the complications and origins of our words. They want to hold onto that.”

Abbr. FTW

Failure may be a theme of Henry’s book, but that’s not to say that spelling reform never experienced success. English has naturally trended toward simpler grammar and constructions over time. And while efforts to revamp English spelling top-to-bottom may have flopped, more modest changes have been quietly collecting for centuries.

According to Henry, the most successful individual reformer is none other than Noah Webster. After his simplified shellacking, Webster focused on compiling his American dictionary. After decades of work, the 70-year-old lexicographer released it to widespread acclaim. Like his Blue-Backed Speller, it became a go-to reference for Americans teaching their children to read and spell.

But Webster also snuck in some of his simplified spellings. He removed the U’s from words like color and honor. He shaved plough down to plow and draught to draft. He dropped the K in musick and rearranged centre to center. To this day, many of these revisions continue to distinguish British and American spellings.

“If Webster was a politician, and he decided to impose these same spellings from the top down, I don’t think it would have worked,” Henry says. “By coincidence and circumstance, he was there at the right time, in the right moment, with the right book.”

Another success story comes from the world of marketing. Not long after Carnegie and Roosevelt’s botched attempt, advertisers began to adopt simplified spellings to distinguish their products on store shelves, making them feel fun and original next to their plainly-spelled competition.

For instance, during the Roaring Twenties, many advertisers began substituting hard C’s at the beginning of product names with a bevy of Ks. The linguist Louise Pound derisively called this trend the “Kraze for K,” yet many of these brands are still available today. In fact, their names have become so ingrained in our culture that they feel neither simplified nor spiffy. Think Kleenex, Kool-Aid, Kit-Kat, Krispy Kreme, and Rice Krispies.

“Previously, (simplified spelling) had been the domain of education reform. Now, it was the domain of advertisers looking to make more money, save time, save ink, (and) save paper,” Henry says. Musicians have also tapped into simplified spellings to promote their coolness by flouting convention (Def Leppard and Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”). 

Then, of course, there’s textspeak. Text messages were originally limited to 160 characters, and it often took multiple taps of a single button on the keypad to reach a desired letter. As Henry recalls, it took users seven button taps to type out a simple “hey.” Like the typesetters of yore, texters adopted habits and preferences to save time, space, and, Henry jokes, their thumbs. Gr8, ppl, brb, nvm, and Ily — the abbreviated style list goes on.

And before anyone says this kind of thing doesn’t count, Henry reminds us that OMG and LOL have enjoyed entries in dictionaries for going on 15 years, with new simplified spellings being introduced all the time. In 2021, Merriam-Webster added dox, which is a simplification of the slang phrase dropping dox, with the dox in that phrase being a simplification of the word documents. (Double simplification!)

The future of spelling 4 U & me?

At the moment, these simplified spellings proliferate mostly in their own spheres of influence: marketing, text messages, Reddit threads, and so on. But will there come a day when such spellings are included in student papers and Atlantic articles, while teachers and editors complain that the “proper” spelling is 2nite and not 2night?

It’s possible, Henry answers. “Shakespeare probably didn’t see the evolution of language in his lifetime because he was in it, and life is so short. But he was spelling in a way that’s incorrect for us now, and we are spelling in a way that might be incorrect in 300 years, at least in some small ways.”

He adds: “What’s preventing us seeing it is just time. If we’re both still around in 300 years, we would see a lot of simplifications of words all around us, like though spelled tho and through spelled through. I think these are the early rumblings of what might happen over the next three centuries.”

The reason to understand this history of simplified spelling isn’t to show us what our language and its written form will evolve into. The point is that it will evolve, and no person or group, no matter how powerful or influential they are, can “change something as ubiquitous as the language on a large scale.” 

Language is instead something we all influence “every day, every time we communicate.” We influence it through our misunderstandings, mispronunciations, and mispellings (or is it misspellings?). We influence it with the technologies we create and how we choose to use them. We influence it when we ignore our parents’ and teachers’ irritation with how we speak and write and do our own thing anyway. And we influence it when we get irritated at our own children for doing their thing. 

“The core of the book is that language is always changing — whether consciously or unconsciously, whether direction or indirectly — and no one should fight it,” Henry says. “Language has to evolve just like culture, just like people. It’s hard to accept because we want to exert control over the things around us, but it’s like letting a child grow up. It’s just the natural course.”

(Though, he adds that he wouldn’t mind if we could all agree to make acquiesce easier to spell. Just sayin’.)

* Author’s Note: If you’re curious, here is the article’s opening paragraph in standard English spelling:

“In July 1768, Benjamin Franklin sent a most unusual letter. Now, Franklin was an avid trickster and no stranger to peculiar missives. As a teen, he submitted a dozen letters to his brother’s newspaper under the guise of a middle-aged widow, and he even sent a letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels jokingly requesting they research how to make farts smell better. What was odd about this letter was not the content, but the writing. Franklin had penned the letter in his version of simplified spelling.”I used an online generator to translate the passage into Franklin’s phonetic alphabet. I initially tried to write it out, but found I lacked Polly Stevenson’s patience for those inconveniences and difficulties.