In
English spelling, the three-letter rule, or short-word rule, is the observation that one- and two-letter words tend to be
function words 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 acti ...
s" tend to have at least three
letters. In particular, content words containing fewer than three
phoneme
A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...
s may be augmented with letters which are
phonetically redundant, such as ''ebb'', ''add'', ''egg'', ''inn'', ''bee'', ''awe'', ''buy'', ''owe'', etc.
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 , and , ) 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 be pronounced differently, while the Oxford English Dictionar ...
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 worked in foreign-language pedagogy, historical phonetics, and other areas, but is best known for his description of the grammar of the English language. Ste ...
suggested the short spelling was a marker of reduced stress. Content words always have at least one stressed syllable
A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...
, whereas function words are often completely unstressed; shorter spellings help reflect this. (Interjection
An interjection is a word or expression that occurs as an utterance on its own and expresses a spontaneous feeling, situation or reaction. It is a diverse category, with many different types, such as exclamations ''(ouch!'', ''wow!''), curses (''da ...
s such as ''ah'', ''eh'', ''lo'', ''yo'' are always stressed. Punctuation
Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of writing, written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, c ...
serves to isolate these elements.)
The short word rule dates from the Early Modern English
Early Modern English (sometimes abbreviated EModEFor example, or EMnE) or Early New English (ENE) is the stage of the English language from the beginning of the Tudor period to the English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transit ...
period. In Old English
Old English ( or , or ), 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 developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...
, inflection
In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...
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 (or meter in US spelling; symbol: m) is the base unit of length in the International System of Units (SI). Since 2019, the metre has been defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of of ...
. Some commentators have ascribed such a convention to John Milton
John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet, polemicist, and civil servant. His 1667 epic poem ''Paradise Lost'' was written in blank verse and included 12 books, written in a time of immense religious flux and politic ...
,
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 texts, ''ax''.class
Class, Classes, 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 d ...
to another,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 gram ...
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 ...
s, which are function words.
Many recent loanword
A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...
s retain spelling from the source language or are romanized
In linguistics, romanization 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 transcription, ...
according to non-English phonetic conventions.solfège
In music, solfège (British English or American English , ) or solfeggio (; ), also called sol-fa, solfa, solfeo, among many names, is a mnemonic used in teaching aural skills, Pitch (music), pitch and sight-reading of Western classical music, W ...
scale (''do'', ''re'', ''mi'', etc.; from Latin
Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
via Italian) or the Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and is the earliest known alphabetic script to systematically write vowels as wel ...
(''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".
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