North Bay book unravels mysteries of English spelling

'Often the reason for the spellings is purely historical'

Trevor Schindeler, a retired professor at Canadore College, has spent years putting together his book English Spelling, A Reference Guide. Submitted Photo Picasa / jpg, NB

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The problem with most books about English spelling is that they don’t actually teach you about English spelling.

Most, according to Trevor Schindeler, are about how to teach spelling.

“Different books mention different things,” such as the double-letter principle or the silent “e” at the end of certain words.

“There are bits and pieces all over,” Schindeler says, “but no one put them all together.”

Until now, that is.

Schindeler, a retired professor at Canadore College, has spent the past number of years putting together English Spelling, A Reference Guide (Rock’s Mills Press).

How long did it take?

“My oldest was in about Grade 5” when he started the project, Schindeler says.

“Now he has a master’s degree and is working in engineering.”

In fact, it was to help his kids in school that Schindeler undertook the project. He was hoping to find a list of spelling rules he could present to his children.

“But I couldn’t find a list of spelling rules.”

So his 550-page book was the result.

It entailed trips to school libraries, the Nipissing University library, the public library and bookstores, where he collected as many books as he could find.

The search also included a computer dictionary that, he says, “gave the pronunciation of words very exactly.”

Using the various sources he had, Schindeler found a list of “high frequency words” and started methodically going through them, matching their exact pronunciations to the spellings.

“It sort of became a hobby,” he says. “It’s a very low-cost hobby, just me and my computer. I did it when I had the time and the inclination.

“Once I start something, I tend to try to finish it off.”

One of the frustrations of the English language is that a word like threw or through is not spelled thru or throo.

“Often the reason for the spellings is purely historical,” Schindeler says. “The English language borrowed words from many languages, and they had their own spelling patterns. They were just adopted into English.”

Dr. Samuel Johnson, who published A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, was the first attempt at standardizing English spelling. To do that, he decided to emphasize the historic origin and meaning of words when determining which spelling to adopt.

So words like sign and signal kept the letter “g” because of their Latin roots.

“By keeping the original spellings, (Johnson) was providing more information to the reader, the meaning and the history of the words,” Schindeler says. “He didn’t try to impose a spelling.”

That means that words taken from Italian, Greek or Spanish kept their original spelling.

“That’s what makes English so complicated,” he explains.

“The logic and structure of English spelling are hiding in plain sight.”

Schindeler says the book is designed for anyone “who loves the English language and wants to learn more about it.

“It’s like learning biology,” he says, seeing how the individual parts go together to create the whole.

“It’s for people who really want to understand the English language, who are interested in it is a subject, and for people who want to teach students how to read and write.”

English Spelling, A Reference Guide (Rock’s Mills Press) is available at