English spelling English orthography is the writing system used to represent spoken English, allowing readers to connect the graphemes to sound and to meaning. It includes English's norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and p ...

, the three-letter rule, or short-word rule, is the observation that one- and two-letter words tend to be

function words In linguistics, function words (also called functors) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. ...

such as ''I'', ''at'', ''he'', ''if'', ''of'', ''or'', etc. As a consequence of the rule, "

content word Content words, in linguistics, are words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur. In a traditional approach, nouns were said to name objects and other entities, lexical verbs to indicate actio ...

s" tend to have at least three

letters Letter, letters, or literature may refer to: Characters typeface * Letter (alphabet), a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech; any of the symbols of an alphabet. * Letterform, the graphic form of a letter of the alphabe ...

. In particular, content words containing fewer than three

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...

s may be augmented with letters which are phonetically redundant, such as ''ebb'', ''add'', ''egg'', ''inn'', ''bee'', ''awe'', ''buy'', ''owe'', etc. Vivian Cook says of the rule, "People who are told about it are often surprised that they were previously unaware of something so obvious."

Origin

Many content words would be

homograph A homograph (from the el, ὁμός, ''homós'', "same" and γράφω, ''gráphō'', "write") is a word that shares the same written form as another word but has a different meaning. However, some dictionaries insist that the words must also ...

s of common function words if not for the latter's "redundant" letters: e.g. ''be/bee'', ''in/inn'', ''I/eye'', ''to/two''.Jespersen 196
§4.96
/ref>

Otto Jespersen Jens Otto Harry Jespersen (; 16 July 1860 – 30 April 1943) was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language. Steven Mithen described him as "one of the greatest language scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth ce ...

suggested the short spelling was a marker of reduced

stress Stress may refer to: Science and medicine * Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition * Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...

. Content words always have at least one stressed

syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...

, whereas function words are often completely unstressed; shorter spellings help to reflect this. (

Interjection An interjection is a word or expression that occurs as an utterance on its own and expresses a spontaneous feeling or reaction. It is a diverse category, encompassing many different parts of speech, such as exclamations ''(ouch!'', ''wow!''), curse ...

s such as ''ah'', ''eh'', ''lo'', ''yo'' are always stressed.

Punctuation Punctuation (or sometimes interpunction) is the use of spacing, conventional signs (called punctuation marks), and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading of written text, whether read silently or aloud. An ...

serves to isolate these elements.) The short word rule dates from the

Early Modern English Early Modern English or Early New English (sometimes abbreviated EModE, EMnE, or ENE) is the stage of the English language from the beginning of the Tudor period to the English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transition from Middle E ...

period. In

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...

inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defin ...

s increased the length of most content words in any case. Through to the seventeenth century, before English spelling was firmly settled, short forms for some content words did occur, such as ''eg'' (egg), ''ey'' (eye), ''lo'' (low), etc. Conversely, poets alternated between short and long forms for function words, depending on whether they occurred on or off the

meter The metre (British spelling) or meter (American spelling; see spelling differences) (from the French unit , from the Greek noun , "measure"), symbol m, is the primary unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), though its prefi ...

. Some commentators have ascribed such a convention to

John Milton John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem '' Paradise Lost'', written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense religious flux and political ...

, although others suggest that it was unevenly implemented and clouded by intervention from the printer.

Exceptions

While many function words have more than two letters (''and'', ''she'', ''were'', ''therefore'', etc.), the exceptions to the rule are rather two-letter content words. Only a few of these occur commonly in most texts: the words ''go'' (which also has a functional usage in the idiom ''going to do something''), ''ox'' and, especially in

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

texts, ''ax''. English grammar is relatively flexible about converting words of one

class Class or The Class may refer to: Common uses not otherwise categorized * Class (biology), a taxonomic rank * Class (knowledge representation), a collection of individuals or objects * Class (philosophy), an analytical concept used differentl ...

to another, allowing verbal uses such as ''to up the ante'' or nominal uses such as ''the ins and outs''. The verb forms ''be'', ''am'', ''is'' and ''do'' can be considered exceptions when used as

lexical verb In linguistics a lexical verb or main verb is a member of an open class of verbs that includes all verbs except auxiliary verbs. Lexical verbs typically express action, state, or other predicate meaning. In contrast, auxiliary verbs express grammat ...

s, which are content words, though not when used as

auxiliary verb An auxiliary verb (abbreviated ) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a p ...

s, which are function words. Many recent

loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because th ...

s retain spelling from the source language or are

romanized Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and ...

according to non-English phonetic conventions. This has resulted in short words such as the notes of the

solfège In music, solfège (, ) or solfeggio (; ), also called sol-fa, solfa, solfeo, among many names, is a music education method used to teach aural skills, Pitch (music), pitch and sight-reading of Western classical music, Western music. Solfège is ...

scale (''do'', ''re'', ''mi'', etc.; from

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

via

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance language *** Regional Ita ...

) or the

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as we ...

(''pi'', ''nu'', etc.) and miscellaneous others such as '' bo'', '' qi'', '' om'', and '' ka''. Carney calls such words " exceptions which prove the rule, clearly marked as exotic by the spelling". Clipped words introduce more exceptions to the rule: ''ad'' (advertisement), ''za'' (pizza).

Notes

Citations

References

* {{cite book , first=Otto , last=Jespersen , author-link=Otto Jespersen , orig-year=1909 , date=1961 , publisher=George Allen & Unwin , location=London , title=A Modern English Grammar , volume=I: Sounds and Spellings , url=https://archive.org/details/modernenglishgra0001jesp/page/149 , url-access=registration , access-date=16 October 2020 English orthography