English orthography

English orthography comprises the set of rules used when writing the English language,^[1][2] allowing readers and writers to associate written graphemes with the sounds of spoken English, as well as other features of the language.^[3] English's orthography includes norms for spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.

As with the orthographies of most other world languages, written English is broadly standardised. This standardisation began to develop when movable type spread to England in the late 15th century.^[4] However, unlike with most languages, there are multiple ways to spell every phoneme, and most letters also represent multiple pronunciations depending on their position in a word and the context.

This is partly due to the large number of words that have been loaned from a large number of other languages throughout the history of English, without successful attempts at complete spelling reforms,^[5] and partly due to accidents of history, such as some of the earliest mass-produced English publications being typeset by highly trained, multilingual printing compositors, who occasionally used a spelling pattern more typical for another language.^[4] For example, the word ghost was spelled gost in Middle English, until the Flemish spelling pattern was unintentionally substituted, and happened to be accepted.^[4] Most of the spelling conventions in Modern English were derived from the phonemic spelling of a variety of Middle English, and generally do not reflect the sound changes that have occurred since the late 15th century (such as the Great Vowel Shift).^[6]

Despite the various English dialects spoken from country to country and within different regions of the same country, there are only slight regional variations in English orthography, the two most recognised variations being British and American spelling, and its overall uniformity helps facilitate international communication. On the other hand, it also adds to the discrepancy between the way English is written and spoken in any given location.^[5]