Whatstheword

Spelling tricks, and how to remember which word to use in English

Sitting day-dreaming in my primary school class one day years ago, I realised the English teacher was saying something interesting about how you could “fry your friend to the end”.

A striking image for my then fertile imagination … and a good way to remember how to spell “friend”. And better than that old and better-known rule about “the ‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’”: a “rule” that is cited approvingly when it applies and ignored when it doesn’t.

Rules are often meant to be broken

There are as many examples of it applying – receive, receipt, friend, ceiling, pieces – as it not applying – sufficient, species, weird, seize, deficient, and their. It’s only much, much later I learned that there are two more lines to this rule. The full rule reads:

‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’

Or when sounded as “a”

As in “neighbour” or “weigh.”

(Mind you, that doesn’t help all that much further, as the examples of weird and seize illustrate).

Since then I’ve always tried to work out other little rules to help me remember the correct spelling to use:

Is it licence or license, practice or practise?

Well, one is a verb and the other is a noun … just like “rice” and “rise” … and surely everyone knows that “rice” is a noun and “rise” is a verb. The same applies to other “ce” and “se” words such as practise/practice, advise/advice …

Examples

The doctor, with no patients to see at his practice, continued to practise his golf swing.

He didn’t want any advice from his partner, and decided to advise him so.

But be careful with vise and vice. They’re both nouns.

Is it “stationery” or “stationary”?

I remind myself that “e” is for “envelope”, a type of stationery; stationary means “not moving” or “immobile”

… confectionery or confectionary?

The first describes the sweets, and the second describes the place where the sweets are made or stored. I’m not sure that the distinction is honoured these days, with most publications opting for the “ery” spelling for both descriptions. And “sweets factory” may be a clearer description for a place where sweets are made.

… principal or principle?

The first means the main person or thing in a collection or community, and the second means a belief or basis of belief by which a person may make decisions. I tell myself the “pal” is a person, principal is a person who is head of an institution. Like the principal (the main man/woman), something could be the main (or principal) event or idea in a series of events or ideas.

… separate, not seperate

And if you can’t remember whether it’s “separate” or “seperate”, just remember to separate the two “e”s

The apostrophe, and how to use it

Every time we want to use an apostrophe, we should stop – just like the person who made this sign should have. We should think about it, keeping our fingers well away from the apostrophe key. We should consider whether we want to change a singular into a plural, whether we want to shorten a word, or whether we want to show possession.

If we want to make a singular into a plural, forget the apostrophe.

If we want to shorten a word by dropping a letter or two, or if you want to combine two words (and drop a letter or two), or if you want to indicate possession, you should use an apostrophe.

One kid or more? (And ‘parties’ or ‘partys’?)

Dates
Don’t use an apostrophe unless you’re leaving a number out. There is no apostrophe in 1960s or 1970s, or 2020s. But there can be in ’60s and ’70s where the “19” has been left out

Plurals
Never use an apostrophe to indicate a plural. A bull is a bull, but if there are two of them, it’s bulls, not bull’s or bulls’.

Possessives
The rule can be complicated, but the apostrophe is used to indicate possession, and its position indicates whether something has one owner or more than one owner

If you write
The farmer’s cows were grazing
your readers should understand that you are discussing one farmer and his cattle.

If you write
The farmers’ cows were grazing
your readers should understand that you are talking about the cattle belonging to more than one farmer.

But remember that pronouns – whether they are personal or impersonal – don’t take an apostrophe to indicate possession.

Examples:
That ball is ours
This ball is hers
This ball is yours
That ball is theirs

Its and it’s

The possessive form of the impersonal pronoun it and the contraction it’s also cause confusion. The only time you should use it’s is when you mean to say “it is” (when you are joining it and is). The possessive form of “it” (its) does not have an apostrophe.

Here’s a case of the apostrophe being used wrongly: “We have rain coming in from the west with snow on it’s leading edge.”

A good way to check if you are using the right word is to see if “it is” can replace “it’s”. If it can’t, it’s the wrong use of “it’s”

Lets and let’s

“Let” implies permission: “Bill let Peter swim at the deep end of the pool”, or “I will let you have this coat if you promise to look after it”

“Let’s” is the joining together of “let” and “us”

Sign in a bookshop … more error than creativity

Where’s the apostrophe? The correct version, below, is from the same promotion

Contractions

You may have seen the word “never” slightly shortened by its “v” being dropped, as in “Ne’er the twain shall meet”, or in “ne’er-do-well”. The apostrophe in ne’er is there in place of the “v”.

In more informal language, some examples include

“I will” becoming “I’ll”

“you have” becoming “you’ve”

“he will” becoming “he’ll”

“he is” or “he was” becoming “he’s”

and,

“he had” becoming “he’d”

Other examples include you’ve (you have), let’s (let us), didn’t (did not), don’t (do not)

Get in touch if you’ve seen examples of a dodgy use of an apostrophe

The puzzle of plurals

If one dairy animal that gives you milk is a cow, and two such animals are “cows”, you could be forgiven for thinking that if one little four-legged animal that gives you wool is sheep, two of them would be sheeps. You would be forgiven, but you’d still be wrong.

English is like that. It keeps you on your toes.

“Sheep” and “fish” don’t change at all in their plural form: one sheep, two sheep, three sheep; one fish, two fish, three fish; but if you’re talking about different types of fish, you could say “fishes”. .. “All the fishes in the sea”

How to indicate plurals

Adding an “s”
The most common form of plurals in English is shown by adding an “s” to a noun: girl/girls; boy/boys; book/books; computer/computers; meal/meals and so on.

Adding an “es”
Some words have an “es” to indicate that they are a plural: church/churches, box/boxes, bus/buses, bush/bushes, waltz/waltzes,

The general rule is that nouns that end in ch, x, s, sh and z have an es added to make them a plural. But, of course, as it’s English there are exceptions – as monarch/monarchs and stomach/stomachs testify. The difference, it seems, is how the “ch” is pronounced – a soft “ch” as in church or as the “k” in stomach.

Adding an “ies”
Many nouns that end in a “y” need an “ies” in the plural form: lady, ladies; baby, babies; activity, activities. But then the plural of “boy” is “boys”; of “ray” is “rays”; of “guy” is “guys”; and of alley is “alleys”. How you decide which form to use is by looking at what comes directly before the “y”. If the letter before the “y” is a consonant, the plural is the “ies” form; if the letter before the “y” is a vowel, the plural is the “s” form

Internal change in a word
Some words – irregular nouns – become plurals by a change inside them. So the plural of tooth is teeth, of foot is feet, mouse becomes mice, ox becomes oxen.

Proper names: BlackBerries or BlackBerrys?

Some brand names are so prominent in their field that they become a substitute name for a particular product: “Hoover” for vacuum cleaner; “Xerox” for photocopy and so on. The trade name “BlackBerry” was, for a while at least, a substitute name for a handheld mobile phone. If I have to use a plural form of BlackBerry, for example if it’s in a quote and you don’t want to change it, I would use “BlackBerrys”.

Why worry about hyphens?

The central sign above is a good example of why we need to use hyphens. It doesn’t read easy. What is an “Ins”, you wonder.

“Walk” is quite often used as a verb. It can also be a noun. In this sign it is part of a compound noun… made up by combining “walk” with the preposition “in” – walk-ins, or people without appointments who can walk in off the street for what would be a skin-changing decision. The hyphen would signal to the reader that “walk” is not on its own – it has to go with the following word.

A hyphen helps remove confusion

A man eating lion is different from a man-eating lion; a nude-show director may not be the same as the nude show director

And is it “10 year-old children” – or should it be “10-year-old children”?

Well, the first could mean the writer is talking about 10 children who are all a year old.

The second reference is to an unknown number of children who are all 10 years old. If there are 15 of these youngsters you could say there are 15 10-year-olds.

A hyphen can help remove ambiguity

“I resent the parcel,” wrote the postman in a note to you, making you wonder what he’s got against the package. What he meant to say was that he had re-sent the parcel.

Another ambiguous statement is: “My coop helps me sell my eggs.” It would better to use “co-op”

“Resent” refers to a feeling of bitterness or anger; “re-sent” means “sent again”;

a “coop” is a hen house; “co-op” is a joint business endeavour usually one owned by its workers.

Breaking a word with a hyphen

Of course we all know how hyphens break a word into two at the end of a line in a paragraph. With computers thinking they know better than humans where a word should be broken, we can get some silly examples:

… elimin-
ate

… grin-
ding

If I have to split the two words, I would write them as

elimi-
nate

So we need to watch out and manually correct them.

A good rule to follow is to break a word on a syllable.