![]() ![]() TABLE 4.1: SINGLE AND DOUBLE CONSONANT SPELLINGS AFTER SHORT AND LONG VOWELSīoth occur, and doubled spellings are sometimes predictable but mostly not – see the rest of this chapterĤ.2 The main consonant-doubling rule (Part 1 of ‘double, drop or swop’– see sections 6.4-5)ġ0 ġ1 The three rules ‘double, drop or swop’ are mutually exclusive: no more than one of them can be applied to the same word at the same point (though a word with more than one suffix may exhibit more than one of them).ġ2 The consonant-doubling rule applies only to single stem-final consonant letters and when they double before suffixes beginning with a vowel letter. Also, for an extended historical explanation of why both single and doubled consonant spellings occur after short vowels, see Crystal (2012), chapters 7 and 8. Words with final ( charr, parr, err, chirr, shirr, skirr, whirr, burr, purr barre, bizarre, parterre abhorred, preferred, referred catarrh, myrrh ) may look like exceptions too, but here, etc., are part of the spellings of the long vowel or diphthong (see /r/, section 3.5.8).ħ This rule also implies its converse, namely that single-letter spellings of consonant phonemes are regular after long vowels and diphthongs.Ĩ However, unfortunately the counterparts to these rules are very unreliable: after short vowels both single and double consonant letters occur with great frequency, and much of the rest of this chapter is an attempt to grapple with that.ĩ For all four circumstances see Table 4.1, and for the grapheme-phoneme direction see Table 10.4 in section 10.42. bouffant, chauffeu-r/se, coiffeu-r/se, coiffure, feoffee, feoffment, pouffe, souffle droll, plimsoll, poll, roll, scroll, stroll, toll braille, camellia, chenille, Ewell, marseillaise, raillery, surveillance, thralldom (also spelt thraldom ), tulle arrhythmia if pronounced with initial /eɪ/, potpourri caisson if pronounced /ˈkeɪsən/ (also pronounced /kəˈsuːn/), croissant, mousse, pelisse, renaissance if pronounced /rəˈneɪsɒns/, trousseau, voussoir aitch, retch if pronounced /riːtʃ/ pizza. ![]() There are also stray individual exceptions, e.g. Perhaps the only classes of exception are monosyllables ending in /ɑːf, ɑːs, ɔːl/ (the first two of these apply in RP but in few other accents), which are mainly spelt, e.g. glowworm, keenness, preferring, really, referral, slowworm, warring. 4.1.3 Doubled consonant letters are very rare after long vowels and diphthongsĦ - in stem words, that is, though they do of course arise from compounding and suffixation, e.g. Some brandnames deliberately flout this rule, e.g. There are also a few slang words with : bevvy, bovver, chivvy (also spelt chivy ), civvy, divvy, flivver, luvv-y/ie, navvy, revving, savvy, skivvy, spivv(er)y. Almost all the exceptions occur in compound words, for example bathhouse, beachhead, fishhook, hitchhiker, witchhunt and withhold, where the first is always part of a digraph or trigraph ending the first element of the compound word also bowwow, glowworm, powwow, skew(-)whiff (usually spelt with the hyphen, however) and slowworm. 4.1.2 Some consonant letters are never or almost never written double: ĥ The rule that these seven letters are rarely doubled applies to the whole of the rest of this chapter, but I will mention it again where necessary. There is llama (the animal, as opposed to lama, a Tibetan monk), and llano meaning a South American, treeless, grassy plain or steppe also Welsh names like Ffestiniog and Lloyd – but I’m dealing with English, and not with names. 4.1 The easy bits 4.1.1 Consonant letters are never doubled at the beginning of a wordĤ Well, hardly ever. So in this chapter I provide some guidance on this – but be warned: the guidance does not and can not cover every word, so I end up saying ‘The rest you just have to remember, or check in a dictionary’. ![]() 1 For some people one of the main bugbears of English spelling is remembering to write, for example,Ģ In a national survey of adults’ spelling in England and Wales in 1995 using just 15 words, accommodation produced the most errors 68% of the people in the survey got it wrong (see Basic Skills Agency, 1996).ģ Doubled consonant letters are a bugbear even though the doubled consonant spelling with the highest frequency for its phoneme is at only 18% of occurrences of /l/, and most other doubled consonant spellings are much less frequent. ![]()
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