Pod-Words: The Greatest Spelling Aid
How to make spelling easier
One of the most difficult things for children, and even adults, alike to learn in English, is spelling. Terrible educators will propose incorrect and complex rules that make spelling more difficult.
The public education system often does flawed things like try to force rote memorisation of words with things like flash cards. I discovered my own system for learning how to spell, which was affirmed independently by others, called ‘pod-words’.
What is a ‘pod-word’?
A good example is the very first complex word I learned to spell as a child: hospital.
You can break these up into three pseudo-words: ‘hos’, ‘pit’, and ‘al’. These are called pod-words. Combining the pod-words, hos-pit-al, spells the word.
Pod-words are necessary because the brain has a limited capacity to hold individual units of information in active working memory, which roughly, on average, is seven. In children this is likely to be less.
As it so happens, hospital - the word I had trouble with spelling as a child before learning this method - is eight letters long. Ideally, a pod-word should be between 2 to 5 letters long, with an average towards 3. You can bend the rules if it makes it easier to learn.
Pod-words are reuseable and common
Amazing thing about pod-words is they can be re-used, especially with words that end in ‘ing’ or ‘ly’. For example, ‘exceed’ can have ‘ing’ added to form ‘exceeding’ and ‘ly’ to form ‘exceedingly’.
You’ll find the pod-word ‘ing’ and ‘ly’ used a lot. Apparent becomes apparently, sigh becomes sighing, deliver becomes delivering, sudden becomes suddenly.
There are many pod-words, like ‘ed’ (zoomed), ‘ily’ (funnily, warily), ‘be’ (befriend, begone, bemused, bemoaned, beguiled), ‘er’ (closer, further), ‘ant’ (want, canter, pant, banter) and many more.
Once you memorise pod-words, it is a case of ordering them. Pod-words have a probability of ordering, so ‘be’ is more likely to be at the start, where-as ‘ly’ and ‘ed’ is more likely to be at the end. But these are not strict rules - ‘ed’ can appear at the beginning too (‘Edward’, ‘eddies’, ‘edible’).
English isn’t that easy
Pod-words is only part of the equation. Some words violate any sort of rules, and you do have to invent exceptions. You might notice a lot of words end in ‘able’, like ‘disable’, ‘enable’, ‘table’, ‘unable’, etc. However, not all ‘-able’ affix words follow this rule.
For example, if you can eat something, it isn’t ‘ed-able’ but ‘ed-ible’ (edible). You might think ‘inflate’ becomes ‘inflate-able’, but it becomes ‘inflat-able’. Some words drop the letter ‘e’ on the end when you add a post-fix (post meaning ‘after’, fix means ‘to affix/attach to’), example: Posture, posturing. Pine, pining.
Some words get even more confusing and have an ‘iable’. For example, satiate (to satify one’s hunger), does not become ‘satiat-able’, it becomes sati-able (satiable), where we lose both the ‘t’ and ‘e’ at the end of ‘satiate’.
The loss of the ‘te’ occurs with other words: propagate becomes propagable. Notice however the two ‘a’s have merged, so it isn’t ‘propaga-able’ but ‘propagable’.
Knowing ye olden English letters helps
Back in the earlier forms of English - and we won’t be getting too technical here as this is an overview - illiteracy amongst the public in England was high, and alternate spellings for words emerged - and alternate letters.
For the longest time, the letters in, I believe (don’t quote me here) in middle-English of ‘i’, ‘y’, and ‘j’ were interchangeable, and sometimes they also interchanged with other vowels such as ‘o’, ‘e’ and ‘u’ in rare cases.
For example, Wycke, wick, although spelt differently, are pronounced the same. This is known as a ‘homophone’ - ‘homo’ is short for ‘homogeneous’, meaning similar or identify, and phone is short for ‘phonetics’, which derives from the Greek for ‘sound’ (hence why you have the ‘telephone’, tele meaning ‘far’ or ‘remote’ and ‘phone’ meaning ‘sound).
So a homophone is two words that sound alike even if they’re spelled differently. Key and Quay are two good examples. As you can see with wycke/wick, the ‘y’ acts like a replacement ‘i’ due to old English. It is why ‘wyvern’ is spelled ‘wyvern’ and not ‘wivern’. The normalisation of the i-o-u-e-a letters (known as ‘vowels’) didn’t happen until later.
In terms of old English, wyrm and worm are also pronounced the same, despite the fact the ‘y’ is behaving like an ‘o’ here which is a completely different letter. People in the middle ages were very inconsistent with their spellings. It is why you get such anomalies in English.
English uses a lot of foreign loan words as well
A ‘loan word’ is a fancy way of saying we basically borrowed or took someone else’s words from a completely different language, and therefore it ignores all the rules of English we discussed earlier.
One example is Cliché, where the accented ‘é’ (that weird symbol on the top of the ‘e’ is what we call the ‘accent’) doesn’t even exist in the English alphabet. Then there’s the German loan word ‘Schadenfreude’ (which means to take joy in someone else’s suffering). It doesn’t use German words, because the spelling has been ‘Anglicised’ (meaning it has been turned into English, sorta).
Anglicisation comes from the word ‘Anglo’ which represents the ancestors of the people of Britain. In French, you’d say “Je parle anglais” to say ‘I speak English’, as the French for English is ‘anglais’ which is based on the original word ‘Anglo’. Confused? Don’t worry, it is a bit of multi-lingual light fun (I can’t actually speak French).
Argh, there’s too many rules to remember
When it comes to spelling, you need only memorise the rules that are relevant to the specific subset of words that you use. You shouldn’t be seeking out every obscure or unusual spelling (unless your goal is to win at a spelling contest), but instead making sure you’re comfortable with the words you need for your particular tasks.
The great thing about pod-words is you can break up any new words as well, and learn new pod-word rules for those too.
For example, you might be tempted to break up the words: analysis, analysing, analyst by noting it only changes at the ends after the ‘s’. However, the Greek root of the word should be split thusly: ana-lysis. ‘Ana’ is Greek for ‘up’ or ‘again’ or 'outside' and ‘Lysis’ means ‘to dissolve’. A way of saying ‘to dissect’ or ‘break up into constituent parts’. Ana can also be seen in words like anatomy, anagram and anagalactic.
You don’t have to use these rules (although you may find them more consistent or easier), and you can break up words into pods however you see fit - whatever works for you when it comes to spelling.
Hopefully this Daily Beagle Education article has been enlightening in expanding knowledge.
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