Why English Spelling Is So Weird

English spelling looks broken because it's a museum. The written words froze at different times while the spoken language kept changing, so the spellings are snapshots of old pronunciations. Three big forces did the damage. First, English borrowed words from many languages (French, Latin, Greek, Norse) and often kept their foreign spellings. Second, the printing press in the 1400s locked spellings in place just before the 'Great Vowel Shift', when the way we said long vowels changed dramatically, but the spellings didn't follow. Third, some scholars deliberately added silent letters to show a word's Latin roots (the 'b' in 'debt'). So 'knight' once had every letter pronounced, and 'through' preserves a sound English no longer makes. The chaos is really layered history.