Editing English-language spelling reform (section)

=== Ambiguity ===
Unlike [[Spelling reform#Other languages|many other languages]], English spelling has never been systematically updated and thus today only partly holds to the alphabetic principle.{{citation needed|date=March 2022}} As an outcome, English spelling is a system of weak rules with many [[English orthography#Spelling irregularities|exceptions and ambiguities]].

Most [[phoneme]]s in English can be spelled in more than one way. E.g. the words f{{uu|ea}}r and p{{uu|ee}}r contain the same sound in different spellings. Likewise, many [[grapheme]]s in English have multiple pronunciations and decodings, such as ''[[ough (orthography)|ough]]'' in words like ''thr{{uu|ough}}'', ''th{{uu|ough}}'', ''th{{uu|ough}}t'', ''thor{{uu|ough}}'', ''t{{uu|ough}}'', ''tr{{uu|ough}}'', and ''pl{{uu|ough}}''. There are 13 ways of spelling the [[schwa]] (the most common of all phonemes in English), 12 ways to spell {{IPA|/ei/}} and 11 ways to spell {{IPA|/ɛ/}}. These kinds of incoherences can be found throughout the English lexicon and they even vary between dialects. Masha Bell has analyzed 7000 common words and found that about 1/2 cause spelling and pronunciation difficulties and about 1/3 cause decoding difficulties.

Such ambiguity is particularly problematic in the case of [[Heteronym (linguistics)|heteronyms]] ([[homograph]]s with different pronunciations that vary with meaning), such as ''bow'', ''desert'', ''live'', ''read'', ''tear'', ''wind'', and ''wound''. In reading such words one must consider the context in which they are used, and this increases the difficulty of learning to read and pronounce English.

A closer relationship between phonemes and spellings would eliminate many exceptions and ambiguities, making the language easier and faster to master.<ref>[[Orthographies and dyslexia#cite note-:4-20]]</ref>