129
votes
Accepted
"Conveince": A word commonly used in Pakistan having to do with transportation but no English person knows about it
I think the word you want is conveyance. It's pronounced something like kun-VAY-unss and means "a method or way of being transported".
It is a valid English word, but it's slightly obscure and ...
- 34.9k
109
votes
Why is the correct spelling "eating" and not "eatting"?
Because so-called long vowels (a, e, i, o, and u, when pronounced "like their letter name") and digraphs do not require a doubled consonant to form the participle.
Compare hating or waiting with ...
- 14.3k
81
votes
Accepted
Was "twelve" pronounced as "TPELF"?
TL;DR
Your friend is incorrect. It's not *tpelf with p, but tƿelf with ƿ—Wynn—which was the Old English (OE) letter to represent the phoneme /w/.
So twelve was tƿelf 1. Twenty was tƿēntiȝ 2. Two was ...
- 17.7k
70
votes
Accepted
Why is "iron" pronounced "EYE-URN" but not "EYE-RUN"?
TLDR
The pronunciation of 'iron' in standard varieties of English is EYE-URN (BrE: /'aɪən/, AmE: /'aɪrn/) and not EYE-RUN (which is also a common pronunciation of 'iron' in some varieties of English) ...
- 17.7k
62
votes
Why is the correct spelling "eating" and not "eatting"?
The English language has no universal rule for when to double a consonant
before the suffix "-ing".
As evidence that there is no universal rule,
consider the word "travel." It ends consonant-vowel-...
- 3,148
61
votes
"severe" as a verb: is it acceptable usage?
You are confusing "Sever" with "Severe"
Severe is definitely used as an adjective. It means:
very great; intense.
While, sever is a verb which means:
divide by cutting or ...
- 3,107
60
votes
Accepted
Why is the W silent in "sword" but not in "swore"?
TLDR
The W in 'two' and 'sword' is silent because of a sound change that took place somewhere between Old English & Middle English. The change applied to words in which the W was preceded by [s, t]...
- 17.7k
58
votes
Accepted
The Ö letter in "Coördinator"
See Diaeresis:
The diaeresis indicates that a vowel should be pronounced apart from the letter that precedes it. For example, in the spelling 'coöperate', the diaeresis reminds the reader that the ...
- 3,123
54
votes
Accepted
Spelling/pronunciation of "gross" different from "moss","floss", "loss", "toss" etc
Beware of teachers who tell you that something is "never" true in English. Exceptions abound, particularly when it comes to pronunciation.
Perhaps the best example is wind, which can be pronounced ...
J.R.♦
- 108k
49
votes
Accepted
How to write a plural form of 'ex' (ex girlfriend..etc)
We form the plurals of regular nouns ending in the sound /s/ by adding the sound /ɪz/ to the word. So for the word bus, /bʌs/, we get the plural form /bʌsɪz/. In writing we represent this with the ...
46
votes
"Conveince": A word commonly used in Pakistan having to do with transportation but no English person knows about it
I assume you mean conveyance, which OALD defines as
[uncountable] (formal) the process of taking somebody/something from one place to another
[countable] (formal) a vehicle
The formal ...
- 17.5k
42
votes
Accepted
Why is a 'ph' or 'gh' used instead of an 'f' in commonly used English words like Elephant and Enough?
"Ph" is most commonly used in words that come from Greek, like "philosophy". The Greek letter that makes the "F" sound is "phi", written like φ.
As for "Gh", most of the words containing it come from ...
- 2,046
42
votes
Accepted
What does web-mistress imply as a job title
While these are three unrelated words, they share some characteristics: all are produced by modifying existing words in particular ways that are fairly standard.
You're right that a documenter would ...
- 9,409
41
votes
Accepted
How do I avoid misspelling "receive" as "recieve"?
The usual mnemonic in English to remember the ruling for this is represented by a fairly simple poem:
i before e,
Except after c,
Or when sounded as "a,"
As in neighbour and weigh.
Of course,...
- 2,155
41
votes
Accepted
What is the spelling of `~`?
I believe the symbol is known as a tilde
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilde
The Punctuation Guide is a good source of information for English punctuation and its usage, including what each symbol ...
- 9,757
38
votes
Accepted
"the US." or "the US"
"US." is wrong.
Initialisms are either written with full-stops (periods) between every letter or not at all:
The U.S.A.
The USA
Shortenings are are abbreviations in which the end of the word has ...
- 72.9k
36
votes
Accepted
Does the notion of check word exist in English?
English is an "analytic" language: "a language that conveys grammatical relationships without using inflectional morphemes".
Hence, the morphological forms for "The forest was dark" and "She walked ...
- 36.2k
34
votes
Accepted
Why is there one P in "hoping" and two P's in "hopping"?
Short answer:
The p does not get doubled in 'hope' because it's followed by the silent/ magic e. It's called magic e because it's silent itself, but it often changes the pronunciation of the preceding ...
- 17.7k
30
votes
Why is the correct spelling "eating" and not "eatting"?
The word eating "eat" is "vowel + vowel + consonant". It is not "consonant + vowel + consonant", therefore rule 2 does not apply.
Only the general rule of "just add -ING" applies.
to sleep => ...
- 419
28
votes
How do I decide if an "i" is pronounced long or short?
There isn't a relatively simple explanation, I'm afraid. As you've pointed out, there are more exceptions-to-rules than than there are rules; however, there are some general guidelines that might help ...
- 17.7k
25
votes
Accepted
Why is there a 'p' in "assumption" but not in "assume"?
Assumption is directly derived from Latin assumptionem which does have a P, so it also has a P. Assume on the other hand is derived from Latin assumere, which didn't have a P.
Other similar examples ...
- 17.7k
25
votes
Accepted
Why is the <th> in "posthumous" pronounced as <ch> (/tʃ/)?
TL;DR
The reason why the ⟨th⟩ in posthumous is pronounced /t͡ʃ/ (ch) is the coalescence/assimilation1 of the t and the following u.
Explanation
'Posthumous' is made up of the prefix post- and humous. ...
- 17.7k
22
votes
Accepted
Spelling "brute force"
You have four examples due to how the words are being used differently in each case.
The noun phrase “brute force” describes the raw strength used to achieve or get through something. For example: "...
- 336
21
votes
Accepted
Why do they use small van in van Gogh?
There's a long discussion of this point in the Talk section of Wikipedia. The upshot seems to be that the official Dutch convention (the painter was a native of the Netherlands) requires a separate ...
- 173k
20
votes
Accepted
Why are "LOse" and "LOOse" pronounced differently?
𝑇𝐿;𝐷𝑅
'Lose' came from Old English (OE) word losian while 'loose' was taken from Old Norse around the thirteenth century. There was a process in OE through which s, f and th became voiced ...
- 17.7k
19
votes
Accepted
You can't spell 'Slaughter' without 'Laughter'
The best way to explain why the same letter patterns are pronounced differently in different words is just to explain the actual historical reasons for it. You'll have to choose the timing and the ...
- 27.4k
18
votes
Spelling a word with two U's in a row out loud
I have in fact heard (American) native speakers spell two consecutive U's out loud as "double U".
There is no rule. Language is something to have fun with, and there is a wee bit of fun in saying "...
- 27.4k
18
votes
Accepted
Is "anyways" a correct word in English?
I disagree with @mstorkson. I believe that many teachers (including mine) would mark it as misspelled word, but it's actually debatable to say it's entirely wrong. This is what I found in New Fowlers ...
- 8,628
17
votes
You can't spell 'Slaughter' without 'Laughter'
It is mostly a matter of historical accident. From the outset English spelling represented a compromise between competing native, French and Latin schemata. In Middle English spelling began to be ...
- 173k
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