The Long 'e' in English Spelling and Pronunciation | A Quick Guide!

Think you know English?

Well, here's a challenge for you, have a look at these words,

what do they have in common and what don't they have in common?

Have you got it? Here's a clue. Listen and watch again.

What they have in common is that they all contain the same sound.

A long ee. And what they don't have in common is the spelling,

the same sound spelt in six different ways.

Thank you, English!

Now I've got that out of my system.

Is there a way to make sense of the English language's inability to

agree on spelling and pronunciation? First, let's look at some numbers.

English has twenty six letters, the alphabet, these are the symbols

we use to write English. However, English has more sounds than letters,

so we use another set of symbols to represent the sounds.

There are more than 40 of these.

The long ee sound is represented by this symbol.

And when it comes to writing, in all there are over 70 combinations

of letters that reflect the sounds of English. For example,

as we saw the sound ee can be written in six different ways. Why is this?

English vocabulary has many origins from Latin and Greek,

Norse, Norman, French, Anglo-Saxon and other world languages.

Often the original spellings were kept or only slightly adjusted.

So we end up with a wide collection of vocabulary,

pronunciation and spelling.

For hundreds of years, there have been different systems proposed to

reform English spelling so that it more closely matches pronunciation.

But so far none of these have been adopted. So for the foreseeable future,

we just have to accept it and look for what patterns we can.

Despite what you may think, there are some patterns in English spelling.

Let's go back to the spelling of the long ee sound.

Whenever you see double e in the spelling within a word,

that will always be [ee], for example: squeeze, between, thirteen.

At the end of single syllable words ee is also pronounced [ee]:

bee, free, three.

When you have a word with more than one syllable which ends in ee

and that last syllable is stressed, ee is also pronounced [ee]:

agree, degree, settee.

But if that last syllable is not stressed,

then the pronunciation is a little different. It's a shorter e: coffee, committee.

So there is a fairly regular pronunciation of the letters e e.

And one other useful way to predict an [ee] sound is what's known as

'the magic e'.

If the word ends in this pattern:- e consonant e:

concede, delete, these,

the e at the end of the word is silent, but like magic,

it makes the vowel sound before the consonant long.

Compare pet and Pete.

But this doesn't work if the consonant is r,

then the pronunciation is [air]: there, where,

or [ear]: here, austere.

The long ee sound is also commonly pronounced when the spelling has

the letters e a, like in the words: beach, cream, feast.

But I'm afraid there are a few exceptions here as well,

like: head, health, swear.

  You may be familiar with the guide to spelling that goes:

'I before E except after C'

Well there are a lot of exceptions to that rule,

but the one thing we do know is that when you do have e i after c,

that is also pronounced with the long ee sound: receipt, deceive, ceiling.

And some common words, spelt with i e are also pronounced as

[ee]: believe, field, piece. But many aren't: pie, friend, quiet.

So where does all this leave us?

Well, yes, English spelling is confusing and complicated,

but it does have some consistent patterns as we've seen with the [ee]sound.

But all of those patterns do have some exceptions.

Unfortunately, there are no rules that cover everything.

There is no simple key to unlock English spelling.

And what about the word key? It has the [ee] sound at the end.

Are there any rules or guidelines we can learn from that?

Well, yes, and this one is one hundred percent certain.

If a word is spelled k e y, it's pronounced key.

OK, I know that's not very helpful, but although there are a lot of

words that end in e y, very few are pronounced with the long ee.

In fact, key may be one of the only ones.