The rules

Orthography — Spelling Regularization

Fixes §1 Spelling & Orthography. Companion to pronunciation.

This is the most conservative spec in World English. Per design principle 3 (stay legible), spelling changes are kept light: a page of World English must still read like English to an English reader. The heavy lifting of “spelling predicts sound” is carried by the respelling key in pronunciation, not by rewriting every word phonetically. So we only fix the worst, highest-frequency offenders, and we record what we deliberately leave alone.

Rule O1 — One dialect, one spelling

Rule. Where British and American English differ in spelling, World English adopts a single form. The chosen base is the shorter, more phonetic variant (largely the American set), applied as regular patterns:

Problem it solves. The British/American split forces every learner to pick a camp and still read the other. One spelling halves the surface to learn.

Examples. colour → color, organise → organize, centre → center, programme → program, defence → defense.

Divergence & trade-off. None from American English; a visible but trivially-readable divergence from British English. The rule is mechanical and reversible by a translator.

Rule O2 — Drop purely silent etymological letters

Rule. Remove letters that are never pronounced and were inserted only to show a Latin/Greek root, provided the word stays recognizable.

Problem it solves. Silent letters like the b in debt are pure memorization with no payoff — debt is not even from a Latin -b- word natively; the letter was added by Renaissance scholars (see §1).

Scope — a closed, enumerated list. O2 is deliberately narrow: it respells exactly the five words below, and no others. It is not a productive rule a writer applies to new words; it is a fixed list, closed here. Every other silent-letter word from §1’s list (knight, gnome, write, comb, honest, Wednesday, colonel) is kept as-is under O4, which now names them explicitly — so there is no word left in an undefined middle ground.

Examples.

Divergence & trade-off. Departs from standard spelling, but each result is still read aloud the same way and recognized at a glance. We do not touch silent letters that help distinguish a word or that anchor a very common spelling pattern (see O4).

Rule O3 — One consonant-doubling rule

Rule. Double a final consonant before a vowel-initial suffix only when the final syllable is stressed and ends in a single vowel + single consonant. Apply it the same way regardless of dialect.

Problem it solves. Standard English doubling is inconsistent across dialects (travelling/traveling) and hard to predict.

Examples. refer → referred (stressed final syllable, doubles), travel → traveled (unstressed, does not), stop → stopped, offer → offered, begin → beginned (stressed final, doubles), open → opened (unstressed, does not).

Divergence & trade-off. Matches American practice; removes the British double-l exceptions. One rule, no list.

Rule O4 — What is deliberately left alone

To stay legible, World English does not:

• Phonetically respell common words. knight stays knight, night stays night, light, one, two, who. Rewriting these (nite, lite, wun) would make the page look alien for little gain — predictability comes from the respelling key in pronunciation, not from mutilating the spelling. The one exception is the ough set, and only where a conventional informal spelling already exists (through → thru): that narrow case is O5’s job, and O4 defers to it — the boundary is “adopt an existing informal form, never coin a new one,” so O4 and O5 never disagree about a given word.
• Kept silent-letter words (outside O2’s closed list). gnome, write, and comb keep their silent letters for the same reason as knight above — each anchors a very common spelling pattern (gn-, wr-, -mb) shared by many other kept words, so touching one would only make it an inconsistent outlier among the rest. honest, Wednesday, and colonel are also explicitly kept: each is low enough frequency, and its silent/altered letters distinctive enough as a whole-word shape, that respelling would cost recognizability for little predictability gain — exactly O2’s own “provided the word stays recognizable” test, applied here to say no. Together with O2’s five-word list, this closes every word named in §1’s silent-letter example set: each is either respelled by O2 or explicitly kept here — none is left undecided.
• Merge homophones. flour/flower, their/there/they’re, hear/here keep distinct spellings — collapsing them would lose information, not simplify.
• Touch proper nouns, brand names, or loanwords still felt as foreign.
• Reform -tion, -ough in retained words, or vowel digraphs beyond the cases above. These are noted as known residue: predictable via the pronunciation key, not yet respelled.

Why the restraint. Principle 1 (subtract before you add) and principle 3 (stay legible) jointly cap how much spelling we change. Aggressive phonetic spelling is a different project; World English keeps the written word recognizable and lets the pronunciation layer carry predictability.

Rule O5 — Respell ough words only where an informal form already exists

Rule. The single most-cited offender, ough (8–9 sounds, see §1), is regularized toward its actual sound only for words that already have a conventional informal respelling in common use:

The stopping criterion. The list stops where it does for a principled reason, not an arbitrary one: thru, tho, and altho are already everyday informal spellings, so adopting them changes nothing a reader hasn’t already seen. We do not respell thought, cough, rough, bough, thorough — none of these has an established informal form, so respelling them would mean inventing new spellings. That is precisely the phonetic-reform line O4 refuses to cross: unfamiliar coinages (thot, cof, ruf) trade legibility for predictability the pronunciation key already supplies. So the boundary is: adopt an existing informal spelling; never coin a new one.

Divergence & trade-off. Mild and familiar — these three forms are already in wide informal use. Every other ough word keeps its standard spelling and is made predictable by the respelling key in pronunciation, consistent with O4.

Cross-spec note

Every spelling kept by O4 must still be pronounceable from the key in pronunciation. The two specs are maintained together: if a future revision respells a word here, its entry in the pronunciation key changes in lockstep.

IPA convention. This spec’s IPA follows pronunciation’s rhotic General American convention throughout, including its choice not to mark vowel length (ː): GA does not phonemically contrast vowel length the way length marks imply, so transcriptions here write /θru/, not /θruː/. Any IPA appearing in this document should be read against that same convention.