Definition:
(1) The practice or study of correct spelling according to established usage.
(2) The study of letters and how they are used to express sounds and form words. Adjective: orthographic.
See also:
- Alphabet
- Bicapitalization
- Cacography
- The Chaos
- Cut Spelling
- Diacritic
- Digraph
- "For Freedom of Spelling," by H.G. Wells
- From A to Z: Quick Facts About the Alphabet
- The Futility of Spelling Reform: Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and the Rotten English Alphabet
- Inverse Spelling
- Noah Webster's Plan to Reform English Spelling
- Spelling Pronunciation
- Spelling Reform
- Writing System
Etymology:
From the Greek, "correct writing"Observations:
- "Orthography: The science of spelling by the eye instead of the ear."
(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary) - "In linguistics, . . . the name for the study of the writing system is graphology, a level of language parallel to phonology. The earlier, prescriptive sense of the term [orthography] continues to be used, but the later, more neutral sense is common among scholars of language."
(Tom McArthur, Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford Univ. Press, 1992) - "Even in orthography, the area that is often said to have become completely standardized by 1800, we find a remarkable amount of variation, as Sidney Greenbaum established in 1986. He carried out a survey to estimate how much spelling variation there was in Modern English. . . . He found an average of three variant forms per page [of a dictionary]--296 entries. . . . As a percentage of all the entries in the dictionary, this was a remarkable 5.6 per cent."
(David Crystal, The Stories of English. Overlook, 2004) - "[Benjamin] Franklin felt that the ever-widening gap between spelling and pronunciation was leading the language down a denigrating path toward a logographic orthography, in which symbols represent whole words, not a system for producing sound units, as in c-a-t. He considered languages like Mandarin ghastly for their memorization requirements, an 'old manner of Writing' that was less sophisticated than a phonological alphabet. 'If we go on as we have done a few Centuries longer,' Franklin warned, 'our words will gradually cease to express sounds, they will only stand for things.'"
(David Wolman, Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling. Harper, 2010) - "Like such ideological forefathers as George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie, [Edward Rondthaler] wants to clear up the whims of spelling by adopting a more phonetic version of English, one where words are written as they sound and pronounced as they are written. . . .
"'The kee to ending English iliterasy is to adopt a speling that's riten as it sounds,' he writes in his fashion."
(Joseph Berger, "Struggling to Put the 'Ortho' Back in Orthography." The New York Times, Apr. 23, 1994)
Pronunciation: or-THOG-rah-fee
