who thought everyone was de trop and uneducated if they didn’t continue to spell develop as develope. We asked if he had asked the Queen how she spelled the word, and he said he might in the future, but he never did. Change can happen because dictionaries allow several thousand words to be spelled more than one way and gradually some spellings drop off. Even Dr Johnson allowed choices such as choose or chuse, cloak or cloke and fewel or fuel in his Dictionary of 1755, when he could not make his own decision. Gradually, over a hundred years or so, the more unhelpful spellings lose public support, and the more foreign spellings become more Englished. Around 4% of words have alternative spellings and 0.4% have three or more alternatives. Rare, exotic and dialect words are most likely to have many spellings, because they may be from a different writing system, or may have sprouted unchecked in the spoken language before they were written down. To add a frisson to your own writing, here are some spellings that dictionaries have dropped gradually and you can still find in old novels. These spellings could be the equivalent of name-dropping to those of you who have never met the Queen even once: prophane gulph shewn synonimes subtilty stile croud chymists desarts surprize expence gothick chace excentrick cotemporaries pionier and sope. And develope.
The Chomsky story This section is for the literary folk who believe that English spelling is ‘optimal’ for a deep psycholinguistic reason about representing underlying phonology, deep structure and word relationships, because Professor Noam Chomsky said so. Chomsky himself has written
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