This May, students from across the United States will gather in Washington D.C., for the 100th anniversary of the Scripps Spelling Bee, determined to conquer a spelling system that has baffled us for centuries.
They will arrive with wordlists and flash cards, sticky notes and fidget toys, and multisyllabic monstrosities like staphylococcus committed to memory. At a word, they’ll be able to rattle off Latin roots, Greek suffixes, silent letters, vowel shifts, olden plurals, and other lexical artifacts that seem to exist in English today only to confuse us—in more ways than one.
There’s a reason spelling bees are only common in English-speaking countries: English spelling is absurd. Even the most skilled spellers will admit that English is a mess. In our woeful orthography, choir, and liar rhyme, daughter and laughter don’t, and knickknack has four—count them, four—entirely useless K’s.
So why do we still use it? If our…
